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# Surviving the World's Largest City of Trash
- URL: https://offbeatshow.com/surviving-the-worlds-largest-city-of-trash/
- Published: 2026-05-13T17:46:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-05-13T17:46:10.000Z
- Description: A hundred thousand people in one Cairo neighbourhood recycle 85% of Egypt's waste by hand. I spent a day with the man who runs it.
- Author: Tommie McDonald
- Tags: Films, #Import 2026-09-03 15:01

Garbage City sits on the eastern edge of Cairo, and roughly a hundred thousand people live there. They collect the city's rubbish, bring it home, and sort it by hand on the floors of the buildings they sleep in. Between them they recycle about 85% of everything Egypt throws away — a better rate than almost any municipal system on earth.

I spent the day with Maalem Shehata, who people there call the Godfather of the Zabbaleen, and his nephew Ezzat Naem. Shehata runs a syndicate of around a million collectors across Egypt. He showed me how the money actually moves, which is not how outsiders assume it moves.

What I hadn't expected was how ordinary it felt from the inside. People are born into this, they make real livings from it, and some of them get rich. The tragedy and the enterprise sit in the same rooms, and I've tried not to flatten one into the other.

Filmed in Manshiyat Naser with Dina fixing and translating.