“I saw that it was just lying around, so I decided that I could recycle it and make money,” Lin told me. He and his wife had no experience in the industry, but in 2007 they established the first plastic-bottle recycling facility in Upper Egypt. Their plant is in a small industrial zone in the desert west of Asyut, where it currently employs thirty people and grinds up about four tons of plastic every day. Lin and Chen sell the processed material to Chinese people in Cairo, who use it to manufacture thread. This thread is then sold to entrepreneurs in the Egyptian garment industry, including a number of Chinese. It’s possible that a bottle tossed onto the side of the road in Asyut will pass through three stages of Chinese processing before returning to town in the form of lingerie, also to be sold by Chinese."
Heh. Awesome.
One thing I always notice when you see documentaries of travels in under-developed countries, that there's always a lot of rubbish sitting around, and also a lot of people sitting around. I always wonder why they don't just start by picking up their trash? I don't pretend to understand the dynamics of a place through a TV show, but keeping your own area tidy would seem to be a simple thing to do to improve your own quality of life, and it can cost virtually nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokattam
Also notes there is a church of stunning beauty inside this community. Almost all hipster study abroads, yours truly included, visit this once in their time in Egypt.
samaanchurch.com/en/miracle_en.php
They are frequently the focus of Western NGO work, specifically the children, and at one time a documentary and NGO project was initiated to teach them modern recycling techniques to implement abroad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Dreams
And a general note. And I do mean, general, not just to brc. I see a lot of comments, and I still, as an American of an overly privileged upbringing, that people have trouble with their cultural lense. It is incredibly easy to see "there's always a lot of rubbish sitting around, and also a lot of people sitting around," when in fact the situation is more complicated. These people have been doing recycling in a very dangerous way (to their health) and making a meager living long before such practices, in more sanitary ways, took off in the West.
From Egypt, I still miss the smell of burning garbage, as awful as it sounds, when I ride the ring road between a major suburb to downtown Cairo to get to school. It creates strong nostalgia in me, so I had to say something, as unrelated as this comment is.
Middle class and rich neighbourhoods maintain a basic level of cleanliness(move the garbage to a corner/alley). Cities simply dump the garbage in neighbouring villages (which are poor).
Tldr: Its much easier to put up rather that do something about it.
really? Is this stereotype actually true, or is this embellished? This just seems over the top.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_dialect#Phonology
And even the sound we write "r" when romanizing Mandarin is pretty distant from an Arabic /r/ (ر).
There was an excellent documentary on them a few years ago :
http://www.amazon.com/Country-Driving-Chinese-Road-Trip/dp/0...
