Eisenberg 1 Ross EisenbergProfessor SchmidtCRP 3840: Green Cities3 December 2009Informal Sector Waste Management Practices in Developing CountriesAs global cities in the third world continue to expand under the influences of globalization, their booming populations will inevitably produce more and more waste. Managing and recycling this waste is one of the primary sustainability challenges facing developing cities today, as large amounts of uncontrolled waste are serious environmental and health hazards and impede economic and infrastructural development. Government efforts to collect waste have usually been unsuccessful or incomplete in developing urban areas. Fortunately, the informal sector in developing cities is often more effective at urban waste management than the government is. The informal sector is “charaterised by small-scale, labour-intensive, largely unregulated and unregistered, low-technology manufacturing or provision of services [...] In the context of municipal solid waste management (MSWM), the informal recycling sector refers to the waste recycling activities of scavengers and waste pickers” (Wilson et. al. 2006 797). Oftentimes, the collaboration of the informal sector with private or government entities will result in entrepreneurship, improved health, tighter community bonds, and cleaner and more sustainable cities. In this essay, I will describe various cases of the informal sector's role in waste management of developing cities with an eye to the solutions that have succeeded. It is important to keep in mind, however, that just like first-world models in various development areas regularly fail when blindly implemented elsewhere, each cities' cultural, infrastructural, social, economic, and political circumstances vary and therefore create different circumstances that will only work with specific solutions. Although the health of informal sector workersEisenberg 2 remains a serious issue, in this essay I wish only to address the consequences of their involvement in waste management. Through this survey, a general understanding of what options and benefits developing cities may have for integrating the informal sector into its waste management operations based on previous examples may be achieved. The experience of Cairo is one of the best-known examples of successful sustainability of the informal waste management sector, and is the paradigm of a fruitful collaboration between the government and the informal sector. A group of rural pig farmers who migrated to Cairo in the 1930's, known as the Zabaleen, undertook much of Cairo's waste collection duties in order to feed and sustain their pigs on the organic waste in the city's trash. In addition to selling pork products, since they were already collecting waste, the Zabaleen “made a living by selling sorted secondary materials such as paper, tin, rags, glass plastic materials to middlemen” (Fahmi and Sutton 811) known as Wahis, who, already in control of Cairo's garbage collection and disposal when the Zabaleen arrived, maintained their access rights to the trash and obliged the Zabaleen to pay them for it, acting as brokers with households and buildings in a hierarchical relationship over the Zabaleen. As Cairo grew exponentially in the 1970's, the Zabaleen were less able to handle the city's waste even as the government recognized the importance of the group to the city. Having alerted the international community to this problem, Cairo then received assistance from the World Bank in the form of the Zabaleen Environmental Development Programme (ZEDP), which was coordinated locally by an NGO called Environmental Quality International (EQI). With the composting and recycling plants set up and operated by the Zabaleen, operations and income expanded, decreased need for landfills benefited the environment, and “the community's living conditions [...] greatly improved in terms of housing stock, water supply, sewage disposal, electricity, and road infrastructure,” (Fahmi 157), as well as infant health and cross-gender educational attainment. Eventually, the Zabaleen recycled as much as 85% of theEisenberg 3 waste they collected (Wilson et. al. 2009 632). The case of the Zabaleen thus exemplifies how a government's initiative can procure international assistance to enhance a city's environmental situation and improve the lives of its residents in the face of globalized issues.The Cairo solution also benefited the city and its residents economically. Working with the EQI, Cairo franchised the Zabaleen into about 80 independent companies, each serving around 500 households. This structure “not only enabled the Zabaleen to continue collecting Cairo's garbage and survive economically, but it also introduced to this group a business framework that would serve as the basis for the development of various cottage industries related to solid waste” (Arandel 174). The EQI introduced Zabaleen entrepreneurs to waste recycling technology and loaned them necessary start-up capital. Just ten years after the program's inception, “215 flourishing enterprises had emerged” (Arandel 176) that generated jobs and income, all the while expanding collecting and recycling operations – by 1997, the Zabaleen “informally handled one-third of the garbage of Cairo's 14 million people” (Fahmi 158). The Zabaleen were much more efficient, too – “the informal sector's handling cost per tonne of waste was $4.30, and the formal sector, $14.40” (Chaturvedi). The Zabaleen having helped Cairo, Cairo responded to the needs of the Zabaleen in specific ways; the government banned the use of donkey carts for trash collection, necessitating the purchase of motorized trucks (that was made possible through greater income from the ZEDP). This allowed Zabaleen children to go to school, rather than guard the donkey carts that could be stolen if left unattended while their parents worked (Medina 2). In this way was environmental, educational, social, health, economic, and infrastructural development supported in Cairo through a combination of municipal initiative, international organization recognition, NGO mobilization, and popular ambition. Unfortunately, some inherent dangers exist when dynamic, new systems becomeEisenberg 4 ingrained. Because of the EQI's support, the “influx of donors and funds in the area has created dependency whereby the Zabaleen have gotten into the habit of receiving. They are prone to ask for