Suzie Greiss said: "I mean just look, you can hardly walk on the streets, there's rubbish everywhere. It's disgusting!" She lives in Heliopolis, a well-heeled suburb of Cairo. The capital's streets have grown filthy over the past few years and Greiss, who heads Egypt's Association for the Protection of the Environment (APE), has had enough.

In 2012 former president Mohamed Morsi had made the state of the streets an electoral issue, claiming that he would clean them up in 100 days. He failed. "There's only one solution," said Greiss, "and that is to bring the Zabaleen back to the core of the waste collection and disposal process."

The Zabaleen are a Christian community who migrated from Upper Egypt to the outskirts of Cairo in the 1940s. Extremely poor, they earned a living as the city's ragpickers before turning to recycling in the early 1980s. With the help of NGOs, including APE, they have facilities for recycling plastic, paper and metal; they feed organic waste to the pigs they keep in their backyards. Animal excrement is sent to a compost plant in a Cairo suburb where it is processed and sold to farmers.

The Zabaleen currently collect some 9,000 tonnes of garbage per day, nearly two-thirds of the 15,000 tonnes of rubbish thrown away by Cairo's 17 million or so inhabitants, and yet they have never been officially recognised by the Egyptian government.

"It's an aberration. Over the years the Zabaleen have created an efficient ecosystem that is both viable and profitable, with a recycling capacity of almost 100%. It provides work for women and young people who are the first to suffer from Egypt's unemployment. We need to use this local organisation," said Leila Iskandar, who became minister of the environment after the fall of Morsi in July. She has worked for years with organisations in the working-class neighbourhood of Manchiet Nasser, where about 65,000 Zabaleen live.

Iskandar has reversed the policy of previous governments, which tried to marginalise the work of this Christian, mainly Coptic, minority. In 2003, Hosni Mubarak's economically liberalising regime asked multinational corporations to handle waste disposal. "That model is not suited to Cairo, where residents are used to dustbins being emptied on each individual floor of a building. People couldn't get used to taking down their garbage and putting it into special skips, which were later raided by thieves," said Greiss. "As a result most people continued to pay the Zabaleen to come up and get their garbage unofficially, and then complained because they also had to pay for the foreign service company."

The most disastrous decision was the mass cull of pigs in the spring of 2009 to prevent swine flu. "The WHO kept telling the government that the pigs had nothing to do with the epidemic but the government made its decision in 24 hours and 300,000 pigs were slaughtered. It was ridiculous," said Greiss. The loss to the Zabaleen was considerable.

"Every family had at least a dozen animals and could get about $1,400 for the sale of a pig. That gave them some emergency money when they needed it. The rag collector's income fell by half," said Ezzat Naem, head of the Zabaleen union. "Thanks to that decision the Egyptian government deliberately destroyed an ecological system because once the pigs were dead it was no longer possible to recycle organic waste," added Iskandar. Consequently, food lay rotting in the streets.

Now the Egyptian government is aiming to give official status to the Zabaleen's role in Cairo's waste processing. Under the joint management of the ministry of the environment and the Zabaleen union, 44 local waste disposal companies, using a labour force of 1,000 families, have been officially registered. They will take over waste disposal responsibilities in the south of the city from a subsidiary of Arab Constructors, an Egyptian company.

The environment ministry is also launching a public awareness campaign to get people to sort organic and non-organic waste on the doorstep. "Of course that will take time," said Iskandar, who admitted that she still did not have the few hundred thousand dollars required for that project. "In the first six months we want to provide a free service, because people here are fed up with paying for nothing over the past year."

Ezzat Naem brushed away a cloud of flies buzzing above his head and stepped over bags full of rubbish before entering the Zabaleen union's offices in Manchiet Nasser. This militant in his 50s has worked all his life in waste disposal and seen things get worse and worse. He wants to believe that this time it will be different.

"We have always been treated as a backward people incapable of managing the refuse of such a large town. And yet we are the ones who invented an eco-city model."

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from Le Monde