Young, educated and knee deep in rubbish: the recyclers cleaning up in Cairo’s Garbage City

Manshiyet Nasr’s ‘garbage people’ handle up to 80% percent of Cairo’s waste, and up to two-thirds of rubbish in the greater Cairo area. Photograph: Stefanie Glinski/The Guardian

When Mina Nedi graduated with a nursing degree last year, his friends and family expected him to start working in one of Egypt’s overstretched hospitals. Instead, the 25-year-old decided to join his father’s recycling business in Manshiyet Nasr, a neighbourhood on Cairo’s eastern outskirts known as Garbage City.

Every day, he sorts through thousands of plastic bottles, collected by a team of men who roam the city at night to pick up rubbish, separating them by colour and compressing them into large bundles with the help of a machine, ready to be sold for recycling and reuse.