Egypt is celebrating garbage with a festival

"After 10 years, young people here in the festival will not throw garbage in the street. They learned how to use it correctly to earn money. This is what we want to teach people."

This is how Emad Anwar, head of the NGO Adam Foundation for Human Development and organizer of Egypt's garbage festival for the second year in a row, describes the importance of his initiative.

The festival was launched on March 10 and goes on for a whole month in the Adam Kashefi camp. 

To enter, people are required to bring a specific amount of recyclable material including "five empty cans, five plastic bottles, one kilo of old paper and five glass jars."        

Amid an ongoing waste collection crisis in the country and a continuous rise in environmental pollution, "an estimated 75 million tons of trash end up on Egypt's streets every year," local media has said.

This is why many in the country have resorted to setting up recycling initiatives. 

Dr. WEEE, a company that recycles electronic waste using a mobile app for e-waste collection, is one such initiative. The garbage festival is another. 

The organizers of the festival have also recently opened the Zebala store in a Cairo neighborhood. The store's name is a literal translation of the word "garbage," and is a place where people are paid for depositing recyclable material.

Along with supporters of the initiative, Anwar aims to alleviate the ongoing waste collection crisis while also providing income to those who need it most.

"If this example can spread in Egypt, it will help provide financial resources to serve society," he says.

For decades the country's waste collection largely depended on garbage collectors, also known as zabaleen, in Egypt.

A neighborhood in >Moqattem that relies on the income that comes from recycling is now referred to as the Zabaleen district.

Up until 2009 this major method of waste collection was efficient as all organic material was fed to pigs in the Moqattem area while tons of recyclable material was sold.

But as swine flu cases began to appear in Egypt> the government of Hosni Mubarak ordered pigs to be >slaughtered and this made it practically impossible for collectors to get rid of organic waste, which often ends up on streets.

Coupled with the under performance of foreign companies who were hired to> collect garbage in the country, Egypt's waste collection crisis is now more complicated than ever.

Nevertheless, important recycling initiatives including the Garbage Festival provide hope and a more promising outlook for future months.