At Cairo Recycling School, Students Learn the Business of Plastic Reuse
by Eliza Barclay, Nomad on 05. 1.08
We recently heard a piece on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition about a school in Cairo's Manshiyet Nasser slum community where the city's young garbage collectors are learning the business and economics of recycling and using solar energy to do it.
The school is called the Mokattam Non-Formal Education Project, and has received funding form UNESCO and Procter & Gamble, a company whose products like shampoo are sold in the plastic bottles that end up on Cairo's streets.
Part of Procter & Gamble's impetus for supporting the recycling program, according to NPR, is that counterfeit dealers were filling used shampoo bottles with cheaper products and reselling them. To get the bottles off the streets, the Cincinnati-based company agreed to invest in the school and help the community learn how to recycle plastic.
Meanwhile, Manshiyet Nasser is also part of the Solar Cities network, a project that is installing solar hot-water heaters on the rooftops of Coptic Christian and Muslim communities throughout Cairo.
:: Via National Public Radio
See also our recent piece on noise pollution in Cairo.
Very nice example how solar power as energy source could help in developing countries.
Especially in places, where there is no national power grid, the use of solar photovoltaics devices is very viable.