Living in Cairo Is the Same as Smoking a Pack a Day

Air pollution is so bad in Cairo that living in the sprawling city of 18 million residents is said to be akin to smoking 20 cigarettes a day. According to the World Health Organisation, the average Cairene ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution a day.

A 2002 World Bank report estimates that pollution causes 2.42 billion dollars worth of environmental damage each year, about five percent of Egypt's annual gross domestic product.

Industry is to blame, in part, the worst offenders being factories that burn mazot for power. Mazot is the heavy oil left over after more valuable fuel products have been extracted from crude oil; when burnt, it emits substantial amounts of the greenhouse gases said to cause global warming.

The Ministry of the Environment continues to promise new measures to hold industry culprits accountable for air pollution, but has failed to put teeth into enforcement.

There are, however, signs of hope elsewhere.

An enterprising group of Canadian businessmen and Egyptian mud brick factory owners is quietly overhauling the mud brick industry, one of the biggest users of mazot, through switching from the heavy oil to natural gas.

These factories are usually clustered together for distribution purposes, leading to a concentration of emissions -- with severe effects on the environment, and the health of surrounding communities.

By changing to natural gas the entrepreneurs are dramatically reducing pollution and the carbon emissions of the factories, at a profit.

The conversion to natural gas was initiated by the Egyptian factory owners. They needed technical and financial assistance to make the switch, and approached Canadian Richard Szudy, then project leader of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI), for help. The CCI is an internationally funded programme aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Egypt.

Their request was granted last year when the Canadian International Development Agency, a government body, funded a pilot programme to convert 50 mud brick factories to natural gas.

The mud brick industry is one of the country's oldest. Since pharaonic times, mud bricks have been Egypt's primary building material, and brick making has changed very little over the last few centuries. The industry still uses a crude methodology: barrels filled with mazot are placed on top of blazing hot kilns with a pipe extending down into a stack of bricks. The mazot drips out of the pipe, and is then lit, cooking the bricks.

Introducing new technology into these conditions was "risky" says Szudy, now director of Idea Egypt, a Cairo-based firm. "We had to select a technology that was robust enough to handle this very, very tough activity, and simple enough for the rudimentary capability of a lot of the workers. A lot of these workers are not even literate."

The industrial area of Arab Abu Sayed, a few kilometres from downtown Cairo, has the largest cluster of mud brick factories in Egypt: almost 200. The area also has a population of 80,000 to 100,000 people, 45 percent of them children.

CCI analysed the effects of mazot burning in this region during the pilot phase. Almost 60 chemicals released by the burning were identified in air and soil samples, many of them aggressive carcinogens present in quantities far above the permitted national levels. "Every living creature in this area is suffering," says Hatem El-Bassyouni, Idea Egypt project manager.

Despite these sobering findings, factory owners were swayed more by the efficiency of natural gas and the resultant savings in fuel costs, says Szudy. "They are not doing this for the environment. Very few people anywhere in the world will actually make financial investments just for the environment."

The efficiencies allowed owners to recover the cost of switching to gas within a year and continue with an annual saving of about 20,000 dollars. Furthermore, the gas process creates a much higher quality brick than the mazot fired brick.