In Focus: The City To Soil Composting Process

This episode corresponds to Lesson 6 of our online course.

In this twelfth episode, we speak with Organics Recovery Specialist Gerry Gillespie about the City to Soil organics collection program, and their unique composting process using minimal machinery or manpower; ideal for remote locations and small farms.

Thank you to Polytex for making this episode possible. 

At the cutting edge of the Poly Textile fabrication industry, Polytex is a reliable supplier of quality products, servicing a wide range of customers from industry, agriculture, construction, commercial spaces, and mining in Australia and overseas. Polytex designs, manufactures and services the right product at a competitive price. You can deal confidently with Polytex. For more information, visit www.polytex.net.au.

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EM: So Gerry, would you mind just giving us a little background information on City to Soil and give us some background information on how it all got started?

GG: We commenced using City to Soil as a program in 2003/4 in a little town called Queanbeyan, which is next to our national capital. What we were trying to do at the time was demonstrate that we could collect clean, source separated organic waste, turn it into a high quality compost, and get it into agriculture for much cheaper than we could put it into landfill.

And we demonstrated that we could actually do that. We could collect it, process it, carry it two hundred kilometers, and put it at a farm gate for about fifty dollars a tonne, including profit when the disposal fee to landfill was seventy-five dollars a tonne.

The thing that really surprised us was the very, very low levels of contamination. The entire focus right through the City to Soil program has been on the idea that this material is going into agriculture to produce food, so it must be clean. And we’ve found that that message absolutely resonates with people.

EM: Mh-hm.

GG: Anyway, after the first very successful trial, we were given a two million dollar grant to run the program in four areas of New South Wales – four council areas. One of those areas is four and a half hours away from where we are here. If you use the normal method of composting, it would have meant that we would have been loading machinery onto trucks and carrying it from one place to another – we would have used up our two million dollars in a very short space of time. So it was clearly necessary to find a new way of composting.

EM: Yeah – and what was that new way of composting, then, that you developed.

GG: So we really…we developed this process of covering the material and using an inoculant, and it’s been very, very successful. It’s more or less, if you look back at the history of composting, it’s a combination of what the Japanese community call “Bokashi”, which uses effective microorganisms. These inoculants speed up the process, but more importantly they change the biological nature of the compost pile.

These sorts of processes have been used – there’s a very good description if anybody has the old book by Sir Albert Howard called “An Agricultural Testament”, pages forty-eight and forty-nine are almost this process absolutely described, so it’s very much like the original biodynamic composting process as well.

EM: Okay, and maybe you can give us a talk through the actual process? How do you go about it?

GG: So, the composting process that we use for City to Soil, is basically that we’ve asked people to give us clean, source separated product because we’re putting it back into the soil to grow their food. And people really seem to understand that, because our contamination rates are very, very low. We bring the material into the composting site, and we spread it out on the ground. We take out any obvious contamination – and there are things you miss in that first step. And we don’t shred: that’s very, very important. The argument is because we collect our food waste and the garden waste in one two-hundred-and- forty liter wheel bin, all of that material, pretty well most of it will be no longer than you arm and no thicker than your thumb. So most of that material will break down without shredding. If you do shred in that first stage and there’s a bottle that you’ve missed, what happens is you end up with glass, or plastic, all the way through your compost.

EM: Mh-hm.

GG: And then we get it very, very wet; so somewhere between forty percent and sixty percent moisture. Then we inoculate it with the inoculants that we’ve prepared previously. Then we push it up into a pile, we put a cover over the compost pile, and we put an indentation. And what normally happens then is that green waste in that circumstance will go up to about seventy degrees Celsius, so it gets very hot. That heat drives the moisture out of the pile, onto the inside of the cover, if you’ve got a cover on, and all the water runs off because it’s a slope. If you have an indentation in the top, then what it causes is: the two sides of the compost pile will push the water up toward the top, but most of it will drip into the bit that’s indented and fall back into the pile. That actually means that in most instances – not all, but in most instances we don’t have to apply any more water after that first stage. Although sometimes we put more water on in the middle stage, about six weeks into the process.

But then, after the compost goes through the seventy degrees Celsius, the family population – that’s the first stage, aerobic stage of composting, is totally an oxidation process. Once it gets to that peak, all those families change, and they collapse back into the pile and the process becomes fermentative. So it’s a fermentation process, much the same way as you’d make…as a farmer might make silage, or the Germans might make sour kraut, it uses lactobacillus as the principal biological agent. But those biological processes can change quite dramatically in the compost pile.

So then we just leave it for another six weeks. We leave it for six weeks in the first stage, we take the cover off and check the moisture and everything is breaking down quite well, and we may put a bit more inoculant on or we may put more moisture on, and we put the covers back on. We sometimes turn it at that stage, put the covers back on and then leave it for another six weeks – or another twelve weeks if possible, because in that secondary stage the humus in the pile is actually building quite dramatically. We’ve found with our compost process…at the end of this process we’ve had thirty to fourty percent more compost than you’d normally have if you have a totally aerobic process.

EM: Amazing.

GG: In this compost process, what we’re trying to do is make something. Most waste management processes are trying to reduce something – they’re trying to get rid of something. Which is how the oxidation process in compost is quite often looked at from a waste manager’s perspective. What we’re doing is: we are not trying to solve a problem; we are trying to develop an opportunity. It’s a totally different focus; we’re trying to make something beneficial out of something, and we want to return it back to the soil to give an even bigger impact biologically into the soil.

Interestingly, the council in Armidale, one of the five councils where we’re using the process now (they’ve been using our inoculants strictly now for about eight or nine months): the Environment Protection Authority has just given them an extended license to process fifty thousand tonnes a year on their site -which is large for a regional center in Australia – but they’ve made it a condition of the license that they have to use our process. Which I think is wonderful.

EM: Yeah, it really is. It’s a testament to the success of the process then.

GG: Absolutely, yeah.

EM: And so let me go back a bit now and ask you a few more details – can you tell me what kind of covers you use for the compost?

GG: The thing that we found to be best of all is what in Australia we call grain covers. They’re very heavy-duty, – they’re generally used to cover large outdoor piles of rice and wheat in Australia – they’re very durable which means that we can have the same cover for a long time without it deteriorating because of the ultraviolet light. So, it’s important to get something of good value. If you’re going to invest in something, you’re better off spending a couple of hundred dollars on something, because it’ll last years. Sure, you can go out and buy plastic, or you can go and buy a cheap cover, but, you know, it’s gone in six months. So yes, we try to rely on quality.

EM: Mh-hm. And they’re not breathable covers, are they?

GG: No, they’re solid, yeah. They’re actually, you don’t let any air – they entire idea is to contain the microbial processes. You’re trying to create a circumstance where they’ve got a food supply, and they’ve got enormous family members there together. While the food supply and the family members and the right conditions are there with moisture, then they’ll breed up. And in breeding up, they’re creating more humus, they’re pulling more things in from the atmosphere, and they’re creating beneficial outcomes.

EM: Excellent, and how much machinery, then, would it take to run a program like this?

GG: Very, very, little. Our entire objective in designing the process was to have something that really used minimal machinery. I’ve tried to get farmers to use the process because the only thing they need is their tractor. And most tractors have a bucket on the front so they can move manure and things around their farm. So the only things you need, basically, are the tractor and some supply of organic material, and just a simple cover. So, not a complex process.

And the inoculants: if you look up lactobacillus on the internet, you’ll find the start of those processes. Or even better still, go to your locate effective microorganism supplier and buy some of their product.

EM: And you can make the inoculant yourself?

GG: Yeah, I…we made it in a hotel room in Egypt. So, basically the process is: half a cup of rice in a small jar – a honey jar – with water. And you leave that sit for three or four days. It pulls the lactobacillus in from the atmosphere. With a loose-fitting lid: the lid has to be on, you don’t want little animals getting in there because they carry other types of biology, but the air contains the lactobacillus.

So, rice in water, for four days in a dark cupboard. And then you take that water, pour it off into two litres of normal milk – or skimmed, I’ve used skimmed milk, tinned milk, powdered milk, all sorts of treated milk. After about another four days, all the solids in that milk will form a cheese on top, which is about two centimetres thick, or an inch thick, on top. You take off the cheese and feed it to the chickens, or the dogs. Animals love it. It’s beautiful; it’s quite edible stuff, actually.

And then the serum, which is underneath: you dilute that one hundred percent with rainwater, because you don’t want any chlorine in there. If you do use tap water, let it sit for an hour. But dilute it one hundred percent with water, add a cup of molasses, and that’s the basic product. It will stay in that form for about three years without – and quite stable.

And then we take that product, and we extend it again. We turn it into a more extensive product; it can be used as a fertiliser or a compost inoculant or…. The secret to the whole thing, to my mind, is introducing a process that enables the biology to be as diverse as possible. The more diverse the biology in the compost heap, the better outcome you’re going to get in the longer run.

EM: Mh-hm. And the quality of your compost, then, is quite good?

GG: Brilliant! It matches the best of any compost I’ve ever seen anywhere. We have local people here – there’s a company called Ylad, west of us, who sell their compost for about one-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars a tonne, whereas commercial compost in this area, in bulk, would normally sell for about forty dollars a tonne.

The end objective of what we do is to have a product that is biologically active, has high levels of humus, and it uses the compost material simply as a substrate – as a vehicle to carry the biology back out into agriculture.

EM: Excellent, and so because of the nutrient value, you can sell it at a very high price. And can you tell us a little bit about the feedstock now. I know that this process can operate with variable feedstocks – so what kind of materials can you use?

GG: There are a whole lot of different feedstocks that we’ve used in the process so far. Normally in a composting process you have to have a ratio of about twenty-to-one carbon to nitrogen, up to about sixty-to-one carbon to nitrogen.

Using this process, we’ve composted Australian native sawdust, which has a carbon to nitrogen ratio of about one-hundred-fifty-to-one, on its own. Now, the reason for this, and the reason why variability of feedstocks does not matter all that much, is that this process pulls its nitrogen base from the atmosphere.

So after it goes through the first phase, or while it’s going through the first phase, the aerobic composting will normally blow off a lot of nitrogen, but the fermentative stage seems to build a whole lot of things back into the process. So yes, the mix of the materials is not really all that crucial. We’ve done it with pure food in New Town in Wales in 2007 and it worked perfectly, or we’ve done it with Australian native sawdust at the other extreme.

EM: That’s really good – it’s a really good advantage. And now Gerry, can you tell us in what contexts would this process be ideal for, do you think?

GG: Well, in terms of using the process, I think the biggest advantage is that it’s excellent for remote locations. We’ve never, ever said that this process is so unique, you know, it’s better than any other compost process in the world. Composting processes have been around since the dawn of time, and nature is very good at doing it in all sorts of different ways. But what we’ve tried to do is come up with a process that can be used in remote locations, or by farmers, to get a very, very good product.

The process is not that different to biodynamic composting, except biodynamic composting is not generally covered. And this is absolutely simple. If you’re a farmer and you don’t have time – you can set up the compost pile, put the cover on, and just go away for six months.

EM: That’s incredible, so it really requires very little. And the odour issues either, isn’t there not?

GG: Not at all. No odour…no shredding, no turning, no odour.

EM: That’s amazing.

GG: Yeah.

EM: And we know that in order to make good quality compost, you need a very clean source of organics – and you mentioned before that you’d had great success with the City to Soil program – can you give us an idea as to why that is?

GG: The thing, I suppose, that’s really unique about – well, I don’t “suppose”. It is. The thing that’s absolutely really unique about City to Soil is the community engagement process. I think people have got to a stage with recycling programs where they see that when they’re putting their newspaper into bin, or their aluminium (or aluminum, as the Americans would say) into a recycling bin, they’re giving that material away. They pay for the service to have the material collected, and in most instances it goes off to some re-processor somewhere, so they’re giving Rupert Murdoch his newspaper back at a discount price. Or they’re giving aluminium away to Comalco or one of these larger companies. Where…if you put organic material into a bin and it’s being made into compost and it’s going back into soil to produce food – the people see that it’s a very real connection.

I think that what we’ve done inadvertently, and in some ways intentionally – we obviously expected to get very clean material from it – what we’ve done is we’ve hit a button in people that really resonates with them.

We’re operating now in five council areas with City to Soil, and our contamination rate seems to get lower and lower, not worse and worse. Most contamination rates around the world in organics recycling, people think they’re doing really well if they only have five percent contamination. Our contamination has never gone above point-four of one percent. The lowest council – we just started at a place called Palerang. Their contamination level is currently running at point-zero-six of one percent.

So, in a small town of about four hundred people, we collected one-and-a-half tonnes of material and the total contamination were two soft drink cans and one plastic pot. That’s absolutely nothing.

EM: That is really incredible. And for our final question now, because we’re running out of time: can you tell us how you get such low contamination rates? What do you do?

GG: What we collect is garden waste and food scraps together. Now, that’s unusual, but in Australia, our circumstances are relatively unusual. We have four hundred and fifty-five million hectares of land under agriculture. Seventy-five percent of that land has got less than one percent organic material in it, so our soils are very low in organic material.

We have about forty-five million tonnes of waste a year, and about sixty percent of that is organic. So it’s an absolute no-brainer that the thing we should be clean product, and getting it back into our soils.

So to make that as easy as possible for people, we use a two hundred and forty liter wheel bin – a cart for the Americans – into which…we give people a compostable bag which sits on their kitchen bench. Because the compostable bag breathes, it allows water to go out of it, and allows the material to lose a lot of its moisture, but it won’t smell. People then tie up that bag and they put that in with their green waste in a two hundred and forty liter wheel bin.

The difference with our bags, is that when we give a household a roll of one hundred and fifty bags, they all have a number on them. So we can, theoretically, if we’ve registered the number against the street address of the house that we gave it to – we know where that bag came from. But we don’t use it negatively; what we generally do is we’ll wait until we get bags back at the composting site, we’ll pull two of those bags out of the compost pile and if there is no metal, glass or plastic in those bags when we open them, that household wins a one hundred dollar hamper of fruit and vegetables.

We’re trying to make people think about where their food comes from. But, more importantly the fundamental thing about City to Soil is trying to connect the urban population back to the rural population. And that whole link is to try to get people to think about the farmer as their food supplier. Because regardless of a farmer’s religious, political or social beliefs, you need to have a relationship with them because they’re growing your food. And they need security and you need security of supply.

So food is very, very important to us. We say to people all the time: if you eat, you’re involved, you know? It’s a process you can’t avoid. And so…and we think this message can transfer quite comfortably into any language, because it’s a very simple message. It’s just simply saying: clean material goes into your food supply.

EM: Amazing, that’s a great message. Well, congratulations on the success of the program, and Gerry, that’s all we have time for today so…

GG: Alright.

EM: Thanks a million for coming on the show.

GG: Okay, talk to you soon!

Recycling Heroes: The Zabbaleen of Cairo

This episode corresponds to Lesson 4 of our online course.

In this eighth episode, we talk to Malcolm Williams about his recent trip to Egypt to meet the Zabbaleen community, who are now recognised as the official waste collectors of Cairo. The Zabbaleen have been recycling for over sixty years, and Malcolm gives us an insight into the incredible workflow of the Zabbaleen, the hardships they’ve endured, and the reasons for their success in maintaining such a great recycling system.

Thank you to Zero Waste Europe for making this episode possible.

Zero Waste Europe is an European initiative bringing together 20 organisations and 300 municipalities committed to work to eliminate waste in Europe. Zero Waste Europe proposes to re-design our society in a way that all superfluous waste is eliminated and everything that is produced can be re-used, repaired, composted or recycled back into the system.

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TRANSCRIPT:

EM: Just for a little background information, the Zabbaleen were originally pig farmers who went to Cairo to collect food waste – food scraps – for their pigs way back in the 1940s is that correct?

MW: Yep, the Zabbaleen are absolutely – if I’d known this I’d probably taken a plaque or a Nobel prize or something or other because they are THE recyclers; the recyclers of my dreams. In about 1944-ish, so the story goes, some of the Zabbaleen, who were pig farmers in the south of Egypt, were suffering some minor droughts and having some problems with their farming, so they moved up to the outskirts of Cairo and started collecting food waste from people by knocking on their doors and saying “can we have your food waste, please” – you know, that’s not unreasonable is it? Anyway, they did that and for five or six years they were setting up their pig farms on the outskirts of Cairo and all the rest of it.

And then in 1949, there was a severe drought in that part of Egypt and the rest of the Zabbaleen moved up to Cairo in numbers – I’m not quite sure what numbers – but they now number a hundred and seventy-five thousand or thereabouts. And whereas they were in the outskirts of Cairo when they first moved up in 1949, and knocking on doors, now they’re sort of more integral because Cairo has grown two, three, four times the size as it was in those days, so they’re in…well I wouldn’t call it the centre of the city, but sort of, certainly inside the ring-road so to speak.

EM: And they were primarily pig farmers up until recently – I know that during the swine flu epidemic all of their pigs were culled?

MW: Yes, this is…more than a sad tale. They came up and they were collecting mostly food waste to start with, as I said, but as time went on, and in the eighties – seventies/eighties – they started collecting other stuff, paper…and started selling that. In other words they became what we now know as dry recyclet collectors as well as collecting the organic, but the important thing is that they collected the organics first. And the other important thing is that they had a deal with the householder – not the local authorities, not with the government or anything – it was just: somebody came and collected your food waste every day at a certain time and they knocked on the door to get it. Because, if they hadn’t knocked on the door to get it – if, like we have here, the dry recyclet was put outside the door – then somebody else would take it, because it’s valuable.

So, that’s the situation and then when the pigs were killed three or four years back by the Mubarak government – without any compensation, you know, the government didn’t say “right, three hundred thousand pigs at so-many dollars a pig, distribute this amongst yourselves”, they just killed the pigs. And they more than halved the income of the Zabbaleen. We had various reports, up to ninety percent of incomes being lost. Because they used to actually eat about twenty percent, and then they would sell the other eighty percent into market.

EM: That’s absolutely horrendous treatment, and they…what are they doing now, are they still recycling?

MW: Yeah, it’s been a bit of a problem for the last three or four years, which is one of the reasons why I think anybody who lives in Cairo will say the situation is getting worse and worse, because since the pigs were slaughtered – before the pigs were slaughtered actually, the Cairo authorities actually called in some big, sort of, international waste companies to do the (inverted commas) “waste contract”. And those big companies, basically, found that they couldn’t actually access the fourteen thousand tonnes of material that arise in Cairo every day because the Zabbaleen have got it, they collected it. From five o’clock in the morning they’re out there until about midday collecting the stuff, and bringing it back to their homes where they sort it out, reprocess it, bulk it and sell it.

So, the figures vary a little bit, but before the pigs were slaughtered they were actually eleven of the fourteen thousand tonnes that were arising, and all of that was actually recycled or reprocessed because the pigs were eating all the food waste. And so that was eighty – that’s an eighty percent recycling rate going back three or four years. Now, that would have put them in the lead in the world as far as recycling rates were concerned. And they did it because they knocked on doors to get it, you know? So it’s the ultimate kerbside, you know, collection system with a sorting at the door, sort of thing.

EM: That’s amazing, and they’re not getting paid for their service at all?

MW: The stories vary slightly. It’s quite interesting when you talk to them. In some places, there is another process where the householder pays so much per month – it varied in our discussions between five and twelve Egyptian pounds (which is about one pound twenty in UK terms, what’s that…just a bit more than a dollar) a month, yeah – through their electricity bills. And the proceeds for that are paid to the municipalities to actually organise the collections – or the government collects that in some sort of way. And, I don’t know whether they use that to pay the big waste companies and also the middle men who actually sort of organise…almost organise the Zabbaleen into, sort of, districts. Middlemen seem to feature a lot in the conversations and we weren’t quite sure how they figured in terms of how they got paid. But they did definitely got paid, so I suspect they get paid a lot from those electricity bill profits. And anyway, the Zabbaleen, basically, get only the proceeds from the dry recyclet, and they’re starting to reintroduce ideas about using the organics.

EM: Right, so that’s what they get, and the government and the middlemen who organise them get the proceeds from the electricity bills?

MW: Yeah.

EM: Right okay. And I’ll like to move on a little bit now and talk about the Zabbaleen’s process – how do they go about recycling at all?

MW: Yeah, I mean, it was really interesting from my point of view, because really from the outside I’d seen from the films, you know, from Garbage Dreams and a few clips on YouTube, that they were reprocessing in pretty, sort of, strange circumstances. And I was sort of a little bit nervous about going, I think, you know, “God this is going to be, you know, a bit like wandering a landfill site”. It wasn’t smelly – it wasn’t brilliant, I’ve got to say. And health and safety certainly is probably not an issue for them: they’re survivors, they’re living of scraps, you know.

But the amazing thing is that after all that sort of manic chaos of very small scale workshops that are no bigger than, sort of, twice the size of your living room kind of thing, they end up producing pretty high-grade recyclet. The cardboard is cardboard, the paper is paper, the cans are cans and the plastics are plastics, sorted into all the grains.

And there’s some really, sort of, interesting technologies being used there. They make their own shredders and chippers and they actually go as far as extruding plastic into pellet, selling it onto the market at a very high price, so…. And yeah, again, the health and safety is not particularly good and the air conditioning and all the rest of it is not…it’s pretty, well, basic if at all. We are talking about what other people might call slum dwelling, and then there’s a lot of stuff, there’s a lot of product all over the place. But it all gets bailed up for market in a way in which I think UK reprocessors would be quite delighted to receive, they’d pay a good price for it. It’s a higher quality than we produce here in some of our “so-called” highly technological collection systems, especially using MRFs.

EM: Yeah, so they go out every day to collect it door-to-door?

MW: Yes. The men go out and collect it in the morning and bring it back, and then everybody scrambles over it and sorts it out, making it ready for market. There are four and a half million hereditaments – households, flats condominiums – all in, mostly, sort of, tower blocks and various…. And those houses are visited by the Zabbaleen collectors – four and a half million to five million estimate – at the very least every other day. In the posh areas they’re visited every single day. Every single day somebody knocks on your door and says “can I have your waste please”. I mean that’s just incredible! That’s just absolutely unbelievable. You know, I think you know – I didn’t know that. So for me they’re heroes – they’re total bloody heroes and they’re getting, I mean, they’re not getting paid much for what they’re doing.

EM: No, they really aren’t. And what are they doing now with the organic material?

MW: Yeah well we asked that question, we got some very sort of shifty looks and shaky eyes you know? Because, I think in reading between the lines that they do collect the organics but they realise that the most important thing for them is to keep that collection service going, they know that that’s their stake in society, if you like. So they keep that going absolutely. But what happens to the organics now varies. Now, it might be that it goes to their chickens and their goats and all the rest of it, but there’s a lot of organics lying around. So you rather suspect that – rather than pay two hundred Egyptian pounds to put it on a truck and send it up thirty-five kilometers to the landfill site, and then pay to have it put in there – then I rather suspect that what they do (and this is how they answered our questions on this one) is they said they put it into the government, in the contractors skips that were lying around the place. They’re not very good skips by the way, and they’re not very, they’re not emptied particularly well. So you get a lot of detritus around the skips, and there’s a lot of evidence of fly-tipping, burning rubbish everywhere. Which is one of the reasons why the government wanted Laila I think, to be the environment minister to actually sort out the “waste” problem – inverted commas – in and around Cairo.

EM: So really if the city just invested in the Zabbaleen, there wouldn’t be such a waste problem?

MW: Well yeah, I mean it stands out like a sore thumb, doesn’t it? If you actually paid the people to do the work, that’s a good idea for a start isn’t it? I mean I’m not, I don’t want to get involved in sort of guessing what the politics are, but you have to remember that the Zabbaleen are one hundred and seventy-five thousand Coptic Christians – and bearing in mind that Egypt used to be a Christian country before, not so long ago – and the predominant culture in Cairo at the moment is Muslim. So, I mean I don’t suppose having districts where there are people raising pigs and being a bit smelly and a bit slummy within your suburbs is actually, you know, good neighbour stuff, but if they had got paid properly for doing it, they could have invested and maybe moved out of the city, you know? They could have actually, you know, moved into the farming areas, which is what they as being – they started as pig farmers.

And when you ask them questions about what they wanted, they said two things: trucks – that was the interesting one, always something plus trucks, right? But the other things they said were: “well we want to be respected, we don’t want to be looked down on. We want to actually have a normal life as human beings in Cairo.” You know, it’s the old thing, isn’t it: what’s more valuable, a doctor or a waste collector? You know, it’s the old Marxist dilemma. And, I can tell you that if they stopped work tomorrow – which they will never do – if they stopped work tomorrow, it wouldn’t take…it would be a matter of days before Cairo would feel the pinch on that one.

EM: Yeah, definitely. And what did you and Gerry do over there to help them out?

MW: Well that was interesting because obviously we were – I mean, I said up front, Gerry and I both sent messages into Laila saying that the last thing we want to do is just be another two white guys coming from, you know, where we come from, you know, telling these guys what to do. I mean, these are the – they’re the experts I learned a hell of a lot more from them then they ever learnt from me in terms of recycling. They’ve been doing it for sixty years, you know? So it was humbling in that sense.

But on the other hand, by coincidence – and Gerry and I sort of came to this conclusion fairly quickly, really, within a couple of days – actually, we could actually help. That we had a bit of technology that I don’t thing they’d have heard of, or if they had, they hadn’t utilised, which would actually help them to actually make some use of that organic material. In other words, the Groundswell process, you know: no shred, no turned…basic equipment; it’s letting nature take its course, really. Basically – using inoculants to (muffled). So, we came to the conclusion fairly quickly that we could help them by asking them if they could use this system, which we then did and they said they could, and we did some workshops showing them how to make the stuff that they were going to use to inoculate their compost piles with.

Laila’s got some plans for doing some pilot trials in six districts – five or six districts – in Cairo. And before we’d got there, I mean, they’d already decided that they wanted to shake themselves up – I think they would call it formalisation. And they’ve some money from the Gates foundation to help them formalise their organisations into what other people would call recognisable companies, to actually be able to – within a few years – have a chance at being able to sign some contracts for delivering services into Cairo.

At the moment, they do it anyway. It’s an informal contract they’ve got with the householder. Nobody recognises that contract, except them. And I’m not sure that even they do, actually, that’s just something they’ve always done. But, I mean, that’s the best contract to have, when you actually think about, because the resources are in the hands of the householder. If the householder doesn’t make those resources available, as we have always said, you don’t get recycling done.

And, so they’ve got that. So I think, I’m quite optimistic that we planted a seed of technology, if you like, and you don’t get change without change in technology, really. But in addition to that, we wrote a report, which we thought Laila might be able to use in persuading her colleagues in the department of finance, or whatever, to think closely about the contractual arrangements in Cairo and to actually recognise the Zabbaleen a bit more. And it would actually make sense if they did that, because at the moment the government are in denial – they’re just denying that these guys do this stuff, you know? And the only people that know full well that they do it are: A. the householders – and that includes the people in the government of course, because they’re all householders presumably – and also the waste companies who just can’t get access to the stuff, so they have to pretend. They don’t mind pretending because they get paid zillions to do it! You know? I mean, it is topsy-turvy.

So I think it’s one of those rather, sort of, strange problems that could unravel itself, especially in the circumstances that Egypt now finds itself in, with its changes of governments and all the rest of it, and, you know, the calling for change is there. Everybody wants that change.

EM: That’s great to hear, and finally Mal, do you have any last words?

MW: Oh, I can’t actually let this opportunity pass: last night – I mean, Laila’s in London at the moment, and we’re meeting her on Thursday for a little bit of a celebration because her grandson Alexander was born last evening. And mother and child are doing well, but grandma is doing even better  (laughs).

EM: (Laughs) Well that’s lovely that’s wonderful news, that’s lovely!

MW: Yeah.

EM: But unfortunately, Mal, that’s all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us though!

MW: Okay! Bye now.