Young, educated and knee deep in rubbish: the recyclers cleaning up in Cairo's Garbage City
Every day, he sorts through thousands of plastic bottles, collected by a team of men who roam the city at night to pick up rubbish, separating them by colour and compressing them into large bundles with the help of a machine, ready to be sold for recycling and reuse.
Mina Nedi, 25, has been working as a plastic collector for five years and funded his university education with it
What motivated Nedi was not family pressure, but a genuine determination to help the environment.
'Climate change, plastic pollution, microplastics. Awareness is growing among young people in Egypt,' he says. 'Cairo has a waste problem, and I know I can make a difference here.
'To me, it's not garbage, it's income,' says Nedi, 'and an opportunity to keep my city clean.'
Manshiyet Nasr, home to about 200,000 people, is known as Cairo's 'Garbage City'
Manshiyet Nasr is home to about 200,000 people, many of whom migrated from southern Egypt as early as the 1940s. As Cairo has been growing – it is now home to about 23 million people – so has Manshiyet Nasr. Today the community, often referred to as zabaleen, meaning 'garbage people', handles up to 80% of the city's waste, as well as up to two-thirds of rubbish in the greater Cairo area.
Nedi recalls that when a priest in the predominantly Coptic Christian neighbourhood died a few years ago, the community paused work for several days to mourn, and Cairo was quickly 'drowning' in rubbish.
Many people in Cairo avoid Manshiyet Nasr due to the piles of stinking rubbish on the streets
But despite playing a vital role in keeping Cairo clean, Manshiyet Nasr has long been stigmatised. Most Cairo residents avoid the area, put off by the overwhelming stench of rubbish piled in homes, on rooftops and along the streets, full of rats and cockroaches scavenging for food.
Nedi is part of a new, young generation eager to break the stigma his community has been facing for decades. Slowly, it seems to be working.
Egypt generates up to 100m tonnes of solid waste annually. And while the country has made refuse a political priority – setting up the Waste Management Regulatory Authority to oversee it – implementation is still difficult due to limited institutional capacity.
Families work together as waste collectors in Manshiyet Nasr
This, Nedi explains, is where Manshiyet Nasr steps in – and opinions of the area have started to shift.
Nedi educates his university friends about recycling being a positive action against plastic pollution
'While I was studying, I worked in recycling part-time to help pay my tuition,' Nedi says, adding that his friends were curious and asked lots of questions. They wanted to learn more and started thinking about reducing their plastic consumption and environmental footprint. 'Recycling is becoming the cool thing to do here in Egypt,' he says.
In Manshiyet Nasr, more young people are beginning to share that mindset; seeing recycling not just as a job, but as a way to drive change.
Rubbish collectors in Manshiyet Nasr load bags of waste on to pickup trucks
'The climate crisis is intensifying across the globe, including in Egypt, worsening water scarcity, heatwaves and food shortages,' says Will Pearson, co-founder of Ocean Bottle, a London-based startup that sells reusable bottles and funds the removal of plastic equivalent to 1,000 bottles in weight for each one sold, with Manshiyet Nasr among its partner communities.
'Global plastic production emits greenhouse gases equivalent to the world's sixth-largest economy – it's in every way a growing and interconnected part of the problem,' he says.
According to the World Bank, the Middle East-north Africa region has the highest per capita footprint of plastic leakage into the marine environment, with the average resident releasing more than 6kg (13lb) of plastic waste into the ocean every year.
Irini Edel, 29, is proud of her work as a rubbish collector
This is what Irini Edel, 29, who also lives in Manshiyet Nasr, is afraid of. 'We're polluting our planet and that's why I see my work as important. It's for the environment, and I'm proud of it,' she says.
She has recently joined Plastic Bank, a social fintech working in Manshiyet Nasr, and with a small team she has hired, she is processing up to 130kg of waste a day. Edel considers herself part of a growing movement of environmentally conscious Egyptians pushing for change.
Top: Irini Edel is able to send her daughter, Justia, to school with money earned collecting rubbish; bottom: Emana Mohammed, 28, works as a rubbish collector and Korollus Foad, 21, is a recycler
'I have two young children, and my work is also for them, so they can have a cleaner future,' she says, sitting in her cozy and carefully decorated home.
Outside, children play football in the narrow alleys, darting between mounds of rubbish. Pickup trucks constantly arrive, with collectors lifting large bags into their garages and homes to sort through and sell on to companies that will reuse it.
Michael Nedi, Mina's 20-year-old brother, says he does not mind living in Manshiyet Nasr.
Fathy Rumany, 38, with his wife, Mary, 40 and three children. One of the families working in recycling in Manshiyet Nasr
He is studying computer science at university, but outside class, he often talks to friends about recycling and the plastic crisis.
'They respect me for what I do,' he says. 'Young people are more open now, more accepting.'
Just upstairs from where he sorts plastic after lectures, the family is renovating their apartment, investing in Manshiyet Nasr for the long run. The ceilings are beautifully decorated; the rooms spacious and bright. 'This is our community and we are proud of it,' he says.
Children play outside amid the piles of rubbish
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The timing was right, recalls Rose. A previous attempt to garner an advisory opinion from the ICJ by Palau and the Marshall Islands failed due to a lack of political support. But Houniuhi and her peers rode high on the global wave of youth climate activism begun by Greta Thunberg, and Rose was sure he could count on the support of Ralph Regenvanu, then Vanuatu's minister of foreign affairs and trade. Regenvanu was already an outspoken advocate for climate justice, who had threatened to sue fossil fuel companies and states. Regenvanu was on board. With Vanuatu taking the diplomatic helm, PISFCC campaigned relentlessly over the next few years alongside a growing network of young activists across Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. PISFCC members, especially a few of the most dedicated, traipsed through the corridors of power with posters and pitches at climate meetings around the world. They gradually gathered pledges of support from Pacific and Caribbean nations and then further afield. Rose was supportive, encouraging PISFCC to keep true to its youth roots to remain grounded and to be able to tell an authentic story. Having followed the ups and downs of environmental politics for years, he says he was inwardly sceptical. But the group "just kept forging ahead", he says. The bet paid off. By March 2023, 132 countries had agreed to co-sponsor a resolution to go before the UN General Assembly. Later that month the body unanimously called on the ICJ to provide its opinion on two key questions: what obligations do states have to tackle climate change under international law and what are the legal consequences if they fail to do so? At the time PISFCC called it an "unprecedented step towards fighting the climate crisis". Its urgency was immediately apparent; Vanuatu was in a national state of emergency caused by two devastating tropical cyclones in 2023. 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The young activists mobilised again, raising awareness of what could have been an obscure legal process and encouraging people to attend in person or through virtual "watch parties". Battling visa problems and on a shoestring budget, a group of campaigners arrived in The Hague, the Netherlands, in early December to be greeted by drizzle. Before the hearing began, they held an opening ceremony that set the stage for the hearing through song and dance, bringing the warmth of the Pacific to the Netherlands. PISFCC had a slot on the first day of the hearing. The group worked together on their speech and Houniuhi was the obvious person to present it. It was a heavy burden and she says she felt nervous going into the court alongside veterans of international law and a forbidding panel of 15 senior judges from across the ICJ's jurisdiction. But thinking of her beloved nieces and nephews and seeing the excited youth team gave her courage. 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The first was the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, which stated in 2024 that greenhouse gases are pollutants that are wrecking the marine environment. Second, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights concluded in July that there is a human right to a healthy climate that states have a duty to protect. The ICJ's opinion is not binding, but it will likely be used to back up climate lawsuits and as diplomatic fuel during international negotiations – particularly at COP30 in Brazil in November. However, the process of collecting statements and hearing state submissions has been important in and of itself. Joie Chowdhury is a senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law, a non-profit which supported PISFCC and helped write daily legal briefings during the December hearing. She says the process led to unprecedented collaboration and built legal capacity among states not previously used to the ICJ. "The law creates the stage to build power, to build alliances, to bring alignment, and there can be great power in that." It also gave vulnerable communities an opportunity to tell their stories and was a way of explaining the injustice of climate change to a wider audience. Houniuhi stresses that most people on the Solomon Islands, particularly in rural areas, are struggling to make ends meet. So while climate change is threatening their economic, social and cultural rights, they did not have the luxury of following a highly technical process unfolding in a court 15,000 miles (24,140km) away. But the conversations that she and others had as a result of the ICJ process have helped raise awareness of what is happening and why. "The language has changed," she says. "The campaigners were thinking about the law in a way that really shifts how it is usually practiced," says Chowdhury. 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It's a message that comes time and again from the young people involved, who stress how collaborative the task has been. "I'm not going to lie – there are times when someone accidentally dropped a laptop and there was a whole lot of looking for funding to buy a new one," says Houniuhi. "But most of the members have held my hand so many times. The nature of the work you're dealing with means sharing your personal stories. This made us realise we need to be the support for each other." PISFCC is tussling with its next steps, trying to work out how it can ensure the advisory opinion makes a difference in the real world while remaining a youth-driven organisation. Whatever happens, this network of passionate activism and friendship that has grown around the campaign in the Pacific Islands is likely to remain. -- Update: This article was updated on 23 July 2025 to add that the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights has also been asked for an advisory opinion on climate change, in addition to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. -- For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
