Living Off of Trash : The poorest of Cairo may lose their recycling jobs.

Each day Mussa Nazmy, 15, gets up at dawn and drives the family donkey cart down the hill into downtown Cairo. Then he goes house to house loading trash into a basket on his back, carts it home and spends hours picking out the plastic bottles and other recyclables. He brings them to a UNESCO-funded Recycling School, where they're processed and resold to plastics manufacturers. "You can make lots of money in recycling," says Nazmy.

Nazmy is one of 50,000 zabbaleen--Coptic Christian men, women and children-- who make their living off Cairo's trash. They recycle an astounding 80 percent of the garbage they collect--far higher than the 20 percent typical of most municipalities. Their prowess has attracted international acclaim and awards. But now, as part of a longtime effort to modernize, the municipality of Cairo may put the zabbaleen out of business. Last month Spanish and Italian waste-management companies began taking over Cairo's trash routes. The contract reportedly costs $50 million a year, but calls for recycling only 20 percent of its trash.

Cairo stands to gain cleaner streets from the deal. That's what happened when Alexandria hired a French firm last year to haul its garbage to a landfill. "We want a technological system, following scientific --principles to get rid of the trash safely," says Mohammed Il Leben, chairman of the Cairo Cleaning and Beautification Authority. "The zabbaleen wouldn't be able to do this."

Nobody disputes the need to reform Cairo's garbage-collection system, which handles 12,800 tons of trash each day. In many neighborhoods, particularly ...