Episode 8: In which we meet the Night Scavs

Every culture has them: people who exist on other people’s garbage. From Steptoe & Son to Manila’s Smokey Mountain, there is always a group, or class, of largely unseen people who make a living or eke out an existence by picking up what others have discarded.

Zabbaline boys on the outskirts of Cairo

In Cairo the zabbaline (roughly translated as ‘people of the rubbish’) are a specific social class belonging to a religious minority (Coptic Christians) and who acted as the city’s unofficial garbage collectors for most of the 20^th Century. Recyclable materials such as metals, plastics and glass are saleable on the open market and other salvaged items sold in the marketplace. In 2003 the Cairo city council decided to formalise waste management by outsourcing it to multinational companies. The result was a collapse in the sustainability of the zabbaleen community, which was subsequently locked out of the market and denied access to their main economic resource.

The fate of the zabbaline is, to a lesser extent, reflected in modern waste management in this country. As I have mentioned elsewhere in this blog, there was a time not so long ago when you could take a load of garbage to the tip and pick up just as much as you dumped: bits and pieces for that backyard DIY project or things that could be repaired with a bit of ingenuity. It seemed that someone was always throwing out precisely what someone else needed.

Not so now. The general public is kept well away from the tip face and waste management companies have the rights to all and anything that is dumped. There are a couple of reasons for this. One relates to OH&S requirements, driven by government regulations, insurance companies and the fear of litigation. The other is simply that waste is a very valuable resource. While the front end of consumerism is telling us to go out and spend big on the new and the shiny and the disposable, the waste management companies are making a killing out of the back end of consumerism where all the new, shiny stuff inevitably goes.

The increasing policy of outsourcing to the multinationals, along with a growing obsession to make waste management clean and technological has meant that people who used to make their livings out of scavenging, recycling and reselling have been pushed to the economic margins. This is always the case where multinationals take over an industry – any industry - that is traditionally locally-based. In the case of scavenging, it has forced the locals to find other ways to access the resources.

I was intrigued the first time I heard mention at Kimbriki of the ‘night scavs’. The what? These are people who come into the tip via the labyrinth of bush tracks around the Kimbriki site after dark and pick over the landfill, taking anything of any use.

Google satellite image showing the Kimbriki site and bushland

The Kimbriki site is deep in a valley surrounded on all sides by the thick bushland of Garigal National Park. The word ‘kimbriki’ means ‘place of water grass’ in the original kurringgai language. In other words, it was a swamp. In the 1970s, when the site was established as a tip, swamps were regarded as wasteland* and therefore highly suitable for garbage tips. The siting of Kimbriki, deep in bushland, added to its appeal as a waste dump due to its distance from residential areas. There is only one access road into the site which facilitates security with large gates after hours. The surrounding bushland forms the rest of the boundary.

Since the industrialisation of the waste facility, however, like the zabbaline the local scavengers have had to find another way to access the resources on which they make their living. Hence, every night they arrive on foot, pushing barrows or pulling carts, and set about salvaging anything and everything of potential value that is left in the landfill after the crushing and bulldozing. The management know about them, of course, and one staff member told me they use the night scavs as a sort of unofficial security. The scavengers know that their livelihood depends upon the goodwill of the management, and they want to make sure they’re not blamed for any vandalism, theft or damage to any of Kimbriki’s infrastructure. On various occasions the night scavs have blown the whistle on other groups of troublemakers or where a potential ‘turf war’ is brewing. This way, they maintain their livelihood and more resources are removed from the landfill before they can be buried and lost.

Do they get much? After watching the bulldozers working the landfill I couldn’t see how much could survive in any usable form. One of the Kimbriki guys told me that a night scav had found a bag of jewellery and another had found a small painting that he sent to England for valuing and eventual sale, from which he got enough for a house deposit in Sydney. Although these sorts of finds are rare, the night scavs do find sufficient recyclable material to make a living on the open recycling market or clean up and sell in local markets or garage sales.

A case, certainly, of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure, but if it wasn’t for the night scavs, most of those items and materials would end up buried and lost. They are ensuring that maximum resources are recovered. The industrialisation of our waste management has reduced, not opened, the potential for resource recovery.

  

*They are now called wetlands and their ecological value is recognised through a range of conservation and protection measures.