“Nothing Goes to Waste!”: Trash collection in Cairo, Casablanca and Istanbul ; « Rien ne se perd ! » : Récupérer les déchets au Caire, à Casablanca et à Istanbul

International audience ; The waste-pickers, zabbâlîn in Cairo, bouâra in Casablanca or toplayıcılar in Istanbul, collect door-to-door, search into trash cans or garbage dump to requalify scraps which would have finished their trajectory, without this work of extraction.They give another life to these objects which, far from being rubbishes for them, have a precise value and constitute an essential resource : their bread-job. Not recognized and invisible because "it is the last one of the jobs", these workers of the shadow do not however form an homogeneous group : the more they collect the ultimate garbage, the more they are in lower position and relegated. Thus the hierarchy of places is associated with the hierarchy of rests. This lower social and spatial assignment also explains that the waste-pickers are rarely associated to the reforms of the public policies, despite a mediatized speech on the recycling, the re-use and the "sustainable development". In the same idea, their work of reduction of quantities of garbage, sold for the recycling industry via the wholesalers, bases the formal and lucrative system of valuation of the scraps, but does not give them access to labor laws or to social rights. In front of this exclusion, felt as an injustice, the waste-pickers, by the actions of their leaders, want be listened and they develop a speech on their professional know-how and the environmental dimension of their work. If they always prefer to remain invisible individually, they try by these organization and mobilization to acquire a collective visibility, a professional legitimacy and the recognition that they are full city-dwellers. ; Les récupérateurs de déchets, zabbâlîn au Caire, bouâra à Casablanca ou toplayıcılar à Istanbul collectent au porte-à-porte, fouillent dans les poubelles ou les décharges afin de requalifier des restes qui auraient, sans leur travail d’extraction, achevé leur trajectoire. Ils donnent ainsi une autre vie à ces objets qui, loin d’être des rebuts à leurs yeux, ont une valeur ...