Recycling in third world cities.

Recycling in Third World Cities

Rapidly growing and industrializing cities in the developing world are exploring ways to recycle the burgeoning amounts of waste they generate.

Urban waste is a serious health risk to the slum dwellers and squatter settlers who make up about 40% of the developing world's urban population of 1.1 billion, according to Carl Bartone, a senior project officer for the Integrated Resource Recovery Project at the World Bank. Many of these squatters live near garbage dumps, and some live literally on top of them. The cities face difficulties in collecting and disposing of wastes, although they spend as much as 50% of their operating budgets on solid-waste management.

Now, innovative waste-management solutions are emerging that help provide jobs, improve living conditions, and protect the environment. In Cairo, some 30,000 Zabaleens -- Coptic Christians from southern Egypt -- make up a network of well-organized and highly efficient garbage collectors. A pair of Zabaleens working with a horse-drawn carriage can collect garbage from 350 households in a day. After sorting the garbage, the collectors will feed the edible garbage to pigs to fatten them for market; sell pig droppings and human excrement to farmers for fertilizer; and sell scrap metal, glass, paper, and plastics to middlemen, who then sell the materials to craftsmen.

"Zabaleens make as much as three times the average income in Cairo," says Bartone. "In many developing countries, up to 2% of the population is supported directly or indirectly by refuse from the upper 20% of the population."

Private garbage collectors and sorters also benefit from recycling. Mexico's Juarez City Co-operative of Materials Recoverers, established in 1975, recovers and sells approximately 5% of the waste stream. In 1984, the cooperative had sales of $31 million, compared with only $6.3 million in operating costs.

In addition, sensible waste management creates energy in the form of biogas and provides raw material for such inexpensive products as water pipes, beverage containers, buckets, lamps, stoves, and sandals.

The Integrated Resource Recovery Project, established by the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank in 1981, aims to demonstrate appropriate solutions that would enable cities to improve their waste-management capacity and make better use of limited financial resources by recovering the value inherent in wastes.

Resource-recovery methods that the IRRP has studied include using waste water as refill material to reclaim low-lying swampland and using treated water for irrigation and fish cultivation.

PHOTO : Sorting garbage in Mukattam Hills, Cairo. In many developing nations, up to 2% of the

PHOTO : population is supported by refuse from the upper 20% of the population.