City of Cairo - Every inch of this slum city is filled with trash

The city of Cairo has never established an efficient garbage collecting system. Instead, residents of Manshiyat Nasser have filled the void successfully for 70 years.

This slum city is notable for having every square inch covered in garbage and is home to 60,000 inhabitants. These informal garbage collectors, known as the Zabbaleen (or "garbage people"), collect trash from Cairo residents in a door-to-door service before transporting it via donkey carts and pick up trucks to their homes in Manshiyat Nasser. There, they sort out the recyclables with a 90 percent success rate, which is four times the amount Western recycling companies produce.

The lives of Manshiyat Nasser's inhabitants were changed significantly when in 2003 the Cairo municipal government hired private companies for garbage disposal which the Zabbaleen now have to compete against. In 2009, in a preventive measure against swine flu, the government then ordered the culling of all 350,000 pigs in the slum city. Pigs were important to the Zabbaleen, since they cleared the garbage of all organic waste.