Review: Garbage Dreams

WorldChanging Team
June 11, 2009 9:37 AM
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009977.html

By Carissa Bluestone

In the first few minutes of Garbage Dreams, after being informed that Cairo has no citywide waste-removal system, we get an aerial view of Mokattam, the city’s largest “garbage village.” Any surface not draped with hanging laundry is piled high with the waste collected by 60,000 Zaballeen, Cairo’s informal sanitation workers.

“Recycling village” is more accurate: In ad hoc workshops cloth is ground down to pulp and plastic is shredded into confetti. This raw material is then brokered through middlemen to foreign markets that don't have strict standards on reusing low-grade materials.

The film follows three boys (Adham, 17, Nabil, 18, and Osama, 16), and Laila, a social worker and teacher at the village’s Recycling School. We meet the Zaballeen in the midst of crisis: Cairo’s decision a few years ago to outsource waste management to contractors from Italy and Spain has seriously threatened the Zaballeen’s livelihood. At one point, Nabil estimates that the foreign companies have reduced his haul by 75 percent.

Garbage Dreams has been getting a lot of attention since its March premiere at South by Southwest -- in April, director Mai Iskander accepted the 2009 REEL Current Award at the Nashville Film Festival from none other than Al Gore. Iskander certainly deserves praise for giving a voice to a community that is at once a vital part of a megacity’s ecology and a marginalized target of scorn, but it’s her first feature, and not without its weaknesses. The focus on the boys’ coming-of-age woes, though compelling, means there isn’t a lot of space for data; at times the grousing about the “foreign companies” seems a bit vague and it's difficult to understand just how the whole system works. The government’s unwillingness to incorporate the Zaballeen into their plan is no secret (read about the controversy here, here and here), and the subsequent failures of their short-sighted approach have been similarly well documented, but without the perspective of the decision-makers or of third parties, we're missing an analysis of whether a program that relied solely on retraining the Zaballeen would actually solve Cairo’s growing garbage problem. Lastly, although it’s clear the Zaballeen feel disrespected by the government and by Cairo society, we don’t get the full picture of the institutionalized racism that these mainly Coptic Christian people face. (A point that has much recent significance: In the wake of the swine flu panic, the Egyptian government ordered the culling of all pigs in Cairo — most of which belonged to the Zaballeen and were the key mechanism in disposing of the organic waste collected.)

What Garbage Dreams does really well, however, is showcase the enthusiasm and ingenuity of the Zaballeen, who have counterparts in almost every megacity. The younger generation is resentful of the government’s dismissal of their recycling expertise (the film estimates that the Zaballeen recycle 80 percent of garbage collected, whereas the multinational companies recycle a paltry 20 percent). They are clear-eyed about the need to modernize their techniques in order to remain part of the solution. Mokattam’s Recycling School, a product of UNESCO funding and Proctor & Gamble-sponsored microloans, not only teaches safe recycling practices, but also literacy and the skills necessary to create and grow businesses: how to read maps, use computers, and understand contracts. The school is currently raising funds to secure a permanent space and expand the campus in order to include the education of girls. In one of the film’s best segments, Nabil and Adham travel to Swansea, Wales on a sponsored program to glean lessons from a modern recycling system. The trip yields a revelation — source separation — which Adham explains at a community meeting. It is quickly adopted as a first step towards modernization, and the group goes door to door persuading their clients to presort organic and nonorganic waste.

The film works equally well as an expose on the “squalor” of a garbage village and an unsentimental slice of Global South life, but the larger significance of Garbage Dreams is the missed opportunities inherent in globalizing waste management. Cairo has been underserved by its multinational contractors — the only one that’s had a reasonably smooth run is an Italian company that has tried to incorporate the existing Zaballeen systems. In the meantime, most of the Zaballeen are barely scraping by -- having been unable to regain the licenses and prized routes they used to work; many resort to scavenging, which is technically illegal. (In this way, the film tangentially brings up the question: Who owns our garbage? The Zaballeen, with their decades years of garbage collection traditions, and life among discarded shampoo bottles and shredded plastic bags can certainly assert figurative ownership of Cairo’s waste; however, when the multinationals show up that ownership is perfunctorily transferred.)

If, when creating its waste-removal system, the city had tapped the immense community capital on its outskirts, where would Cairo be right now? How much more efficient would the city be at trash removal, and how much more optimistic would the Zaballeen be regarding their community’s place in the 21st century?

Carissa Bluestone is a freelance editor based in Seattle. She was a contributer to Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.