A Cleaner City Should Not Make Its Cleaners Disappear

A machine arrives in a city and everybody is encouraged to admire the future. It accepts bottles and cans, rewards the user with phone credit and looks pleasantly clean in a publicity photograph. There is only one awkward question: what happens to the people who were already doing the recycling?

That question moved into public view in Cairo in late August 2026, after two reverse-vending machines appeared in Dokki. Reuters reported on 10 September that the machines prompted objections from the zabaleen—the city’s long-established community of waste collectors and recyclers—because the scheme had apparently arrived without integrating them.

The argument was not a rejection of technology. Shehata El-Moqaddas, head of the zabaleen syndicate, told Reuters he would welcome even helicopters collecting rubbish. His objection was exclusion. After the disagreement became public, the Giza governorate said it would work on integration, and an arrangement was reached for zabaleen workers to empty the machines and buy the collected material.

The city already had expertise

The zabaleen have collected, transported, sorted and sold Cairo’s discarded materials for generations. Reuters cited academic estimates that they may collect roughly half of the city’s waste and recycle about 80% of what they collect. Those figures describe more than hard work. They describe a working knowledge of streets, households, materials and markets that cannot be downloaded into a shiny box.

Cairo still has a serious waste problem. Rubbish accumulates in informal dumps and is burned, adding to air pollution. Better collection, safer handling, modern facilities and useful technology are all needed. But modernisation becomes a peculiar sort of progress when it removes the workers who made the old system function, then congratulates itself for discovering recycling.

Recognition must come with a chair at the table

The International Alliance of Waste Pickers describes itself as a democratic, member-based federation of 59 organisations in 38 countries, representing more than 500,000 waste-pickers. Its point is practical: people who recover reusable material are workers, and policy should recognise their contribution, rights and working conditions.

That distinction matters. Calling somebody an environmental hero is lovely for a brochure and useless at a negotiation. Respect becomes real when workers can organise, bargain, influence a scheme before it is installed and share fairly in the value their labour creates.

WIEGO’s rights-based work on formalisation, published on 1 August 2026, makes the wider case that bringing informal workers into formal systems should expand rights through collective bargaining rather than simply impose rules from above. A badge and a database are not enough if the worker loses income, voice or control over the work.

Technology is a tool, not a replacement story

Reverse-vending machines can be useful. They can make returning a bottle convenient, reward participation and capture cleaner material. The sensible question is not whether the machine is good or bad. It is whether the system around it respects the people, routes and small enterprises already recovering waste.

In Cairo, a public row appears to have produced a more inclusive arrangement. That is not a final victory and it is not proof that every risk has vanished. It is evidence of something simpler: when workers are visible and organised, a technology project can be corrected before exclusion hardens into policy.

One useful act

The next time a recycling scheme is announced where you live, look beyond the machine and ask one decent question: were the people already collecting, sorting and selling this material involved in designing the change? Share a worker-led source such as the International Alliance of Waste Pickers, and avoid turning difficult working conditions into pity content.

A clean city should protect public health and the earth. It should also recognise the hands that kept working while the rest of us were still designing the app.

I’ll leave you today with a line from Kahlil Gibran:

“Work is love made visible.”