The concept of the green economy emerged in Egypt in response to accelerating global crises, such as climate change and resource scarcity, which threatened sustainable development. By adopting this concept, Egypt sought to launch initiatives and projects that serve an environmentally friendly economy, which contributes to creating new job opportunities for young people and shifting consumption patterns towards sustainability, which in turn improves the efficiency of resource use. So how do independent Egyptian initiatives serve the region’s projects towards the goals of the green economy, and what are the obstacles to the success of these projects?
According to the Egyptian State Information Service, Egypt turned towards the green economy by launching the National Climate Change Strategy 2050 during the climate conference held in the Scottish city of Glasgow, with the aim of reducing greenhouse emissions resulting from industrial activity in various fields, and recycling waste. So that Egypt could implement this strategy, it issued sovereign green bonds, as the first country in the Middle East and North Africa to do so, worth $750 million; these are debt instruments offered to those wishing to implement environmental or climate projects, with the value of the instrument repaid over five years, at a return of up to 5.25%.
Egypt’s share of global carbon emissions is estimated at only about 0.6%, which places it among the countries with a relatively limited contribution to emissions. Nevertheless, Egypt has witnessed a large increase in emission rates in recent decades. According to a 2015 report by the United States Agency for International Development, carbon emissions in Egypt rose by 140% between 1990 and 2016, which reflects the rapid development of the carbon footprint. The rate of carbon emissions in Egypt also reached 44% in 2019, according to the Egyptian Climate Performance Index report issued by the Egyptian Center for Strategic Studies. During the period from 2013 to 2021, total carbon dioxide emissions in Egypt amounted to 238.6 million tonnes, according to a study conducted by the Faculty of Economic Studies and Political Science at Alexandria University.
The study attributed this rise to increased consumption of fossil fuels, as average fuel consumption reached 516.4 terawatt-hours during that period. Despite these indicators, Egypt’s contribution to global emissions remains low: in 2015 it recorded about 325 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the First Biennial Update Report, which was issued in 2019.
Banana tree waste
Inside Saqulta district in Sohag, known for its widespread banana plantations, residents used to quarrel every year during the harvest season because tree waste was dumped on the roads and on the banks of canals and drains, in addition to the growing problem of the black cloud that residents had become used to seeing every year because of the burning of waste.
Some young people in the village were thinking about an environmentally safe way to help get rid of the waste, until Mohamed Yousry, executive director of Banana Art, a company specialising in eco-friendly industries, saw the idea of turning banana tree fibres into a raw material that can be manufactured, which is being implemented in India. From there, he started from his hometown, and the scope of his activity expanded to transporting tree waste from Aswan to Sohag to recycle it.
The idea was launched against the backdrop of residents burning banana tree waste after the fruit had been picked, while data issued by the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies indicate that the energy sector is the largest source of carbon emissions in Egypt, accounting for 64.4% of the volume of emissions, and the share of carbon emissions resulting from the burning of waste reached 8.5% of the total emissions produced by Egypt, in addition to farmers dumping waste into canals and water drains, or dumping waste on the roads, which causes disputes to break out among residents and pollutes the environment.
Yousry, founder of the “Banana Art” initiative for recycling banana tree waste, says in his conversation with Zawia3: “I discovered that banana waste in Sohag and Aswan not only had a negative impact on the environment, but also created disputes among residents because the waste was dumped on roads, which could cause them to be blocked, and residents were annoyed by its presence because of its burning, which ends with children and the elderly getting asthma. The banana harvest season never passes each year without problems arising among residents in the villages.”
Egypt annually produces 1.65 million tonnes of banana tree waste, spread over an area of 83,000 feddans, and Aswan, Sohag, Assiut and Qena account for the largest share of the total volume of waste. According to a report issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture in 2018, Aswan alone has 27,000 feddans that produce about 50,000 tonnes of waste.
The agriculture sector in Egypt is the second-largest cause of carbon emissions, as World Bank data showed: the share of carbon emissions from agricultural activity reached 10.2% of total emissions in 2016, equivalent to 32 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, a notable rise compared with previous years, as the share of carbon emissions in the agricultural sector was recorded at 2% in 1990. Yasmine Fouad, the Egyptian Minister of Environment, said in previous statements that the agriculture sector causes the generation of 19% to 20% of total carbon emissions worldwide, in addition to wrong agricultural practices causing the destruction of about 80% of forests globally.
This pushed Yousry and his two friends to help farmers dispose of this waste safely, and they arrived at the idea of recycling the tree trunks and extracting the fibres that can be remanufactured. He explains: “We succeeded in extracting the fibres and received offers to buy them, so that we would become exporters, but we preferred to use this waste to create an eco-friendly product that at the same time provides job opportunities.”
According to the founder of the initiative, 2018 saw the success of the initiative’s first experiment, which managed to offer handicrafts and eco-friendly products made especially from banana tree waste. For this, he used a machine for shredding trees and their waste, which cost about EGP 8,000 to manufacture locally, instead of importing it at a cost of EGP 45,000. The initiative contributed to providing a steady income for 20 families at the start of its launch, and by the end of August 2022 the number of workers in the project had reached 1,000 people. The initiative also contributed to creating a state of cooperation between farmers and the team, which in turn managed to produce accessories and women’s handbags from banana tree fibres, and to provide job opportunities for women breadwinners inside the villages of Aswan.
He adds: “We managed to create a natural handmade product with international specifications that give it the opportunity to be exported outside Egypt, and we took part with our products in exhibitions organised in Italy and Jordan.”
Egypt annually produces 1.4 million tonnes of clothing and textile waste. According to a study conducted by Blumine and Reverse Resources for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, with the aim of mapping waste in Egypt, it emerged that the Egyptian textile and clothing industry produces 212,000 tonnes of post-industrial waste annually, and the proportion of cotton in this waste exceeds 50%, according to a statement published by the Egyptian Clothing Bank.
According to the findings adopted by the value chain study on spinning and textile waste, 50% of the waste consists of cotton and various fibres, while the proportion of polyester in the waste reaches about 20%, and the latter is an obstacle to recycling this waste. The study was carried out within the SwitchMed programme, supported by the European Union, and the United Nations Development Organization implements this project with the aim of enhancing recycling opportunities. According to the study, the volume of Egyptian imports from the spinning and textile sector amounted to $4.4 billion in 2019, Egypt annually exports about 188,000 tonnes of textile fibres, while the Egyptian cotton textile markets need about 78,000 tonnes, and the volume of spun yarn made in Egypt is approximately 140,000 tonnes.
The “Green Fashion” initiative
Hadeer Shalaby, an entrepreneur from Menoufia, thought of starting the “Green Fashion” initiative inside Menoufia, where women’s economic hardship is widespread, and launched an initiative for a green fashion line represented by the “Green Fashion” company in 2018, with the aim of enabling rural women to achieve financial independence in a way consistent with environmental responsibility. The company turns factories’ fabric waste, using the patchwork method, into new products.
The green production process followed by the “Green Fashion” company is based on using eco-friendly, biodegradable fabrics in whose manufacture no chemicals are used, aiming to reduce water use and favouring the use of clean energy during manufacturing by 90%. She also launched, as she describes it, a group of sustainability centres in a number of governorates, whose aim is to teach women leatherwork, handicrafts and wood recycling in the art of decoupage, and she succeeded in providing job opportunities for many village women.
Basma Mohamed (21 years old), one of the workers in the workshops of the sustainability centres in Menoufia, says that she learned inside the initiative’s workshop how to turn fabric waste into new eco-friendly products. Her view of life around her changed, especially after she learned how to make use of time instead of wasting it, and in addition, she was able to get a job opportunity.
She adds in her conversation with us: “Here I learned how we reuse everything. At first I did not understand the value of what we were doing, but I realised that we are serving the environment and offering new products from a material whose fate was the rubbish bin.”
January 2023 witnessed the launch of the first edition of the “Sustainable Chic” initiative of the Egyptian Clothing Bank in cooperation with the Cocoon Cultural Center, a cultural centre that offers workshops in music production, paper recycling and candle making, in addition to hosting listening sessions and various art events. The initiative aimed to change individuals’ unaware behaviours towards textiles and to reduce the consumption of fast fashion, and Minister of Environment Yasmine Fouad had attended the launch of the initiative to support the investment sector in the recycling industry, which in turn contributes to preserving environmental resources.
The initiative allocated a training programme that aimed to qualify more than 80 women fashion designers in independent workshops, held in cooperation with the Commercial International Bank and the Cocoon Cultural Center. The initiative focused on collecting clothing waste to make use of fabrics that cannot be sold or used directly, targeting schools, universities, large shopping malls and stores, while the categories and types of waste are sorted after they are collected, and this waste, particularly factory fabric remnants, is recycled and used to make new products, such as using it to stuff mattresses and pillows, in addition to making eco-friendly, biodegradable bags to limit the spread of plastic bags. And reducing the environmental impact resulting from the consumption of fast fashion, in addition to improving awareness of sustainable clothing.
Environmental initiatives to support tourism
Environmental expert Hassan Fouad El-Tayeb stresses that environmental initiatives contribute to spreading environmental awareness and provide job opportunities in direct and indirect ways. He has succeeded in launching many environmental initiatives through his association, “Marine Rescue and Environmental Protection in Hurghada”, among them one whose aim was to clean beaches in order to preserve the coral reefs that attract diving tourism enthusiasts from around the world.
He says that the initiatives launched by the association have contributed to employing thousands of young people on marine vessels, distributed across 20,000 boats dedicated to sea trips, and adds: “The aim of the initiatives is to preserve environmental marine life, which in turn helps preserve fish stocks, and it is a cycle of life whose parts complete one another.”
According to him, the association was founded in 2016, registered under No. 212, in the city of Hurghada, with the aim of protecting the marine environment from pollution by removing oil slicks resulting from leaks from ships and oil pipelines in the water, and combating the starfish that destroys coral reefs, as well as preparing young cadres and qualifying them in marine rescue, in addition to training specialists to drive the rubber launches used in rescue operations, and confronting trips smuggling irregular migrants by sea.
The association launched a group of initiatives, which included qualifying and training young people in the sport of diving, in cooperation with the Maritime Academy and marine launches, in addition to marine rescue on beaches and protecting foreign and local tourists in the Red Sea Governorate from drowning. The initiative included cooperation with the Environmental Conservation Association and Red Sea associations with the aim of discovering new diving sites. It also implemented an initiative that targeted cleaning the beaches of the Red Sea, particularly on the islands of Magawish and Giftun, with the aim of protecting coral reefs.
Hassan stresses that the initiative has presented several studies on coral reef farming as well as sea cucumber farming, and adds: “A group of researchers from the Institute of Marine Sciences volunteered in the initiative for the protection of coral reefs, to provide expertise in the field of farming, and we have reached farming using modern methods.”
Save a tree’s life
The promotion of the importance of environmental awareness has contributed to directing young people’s ideas towards recycling projects: Islam Ragab, a graduate of the Faculty of Law at Beni Suef University who lives in Fayoum, devised a way to turn oil barrels into home furniture, and presented his idea as a sustainable project proposal to the National Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, in cooperation with the Ministry of Planning.
Islam thought of looking for a project that would contribute to offering recycled home and office furniture instead of cutting down trees. He started from his home, out of a passion for recycling waste such as paper, iron, wood and other things. On a personal level, he admired the new characters of each piece whose fate had been the rubbish bin.
His aspirations for recycling waste developed into study and research until he settled on the idea of turning barrels into home furniture” and, in turn, he launched the “ECO Furniture” initiative, which later turned into a company for home furniture recycled from barrels, built on a set of goals: the first is preserving trees and not cutting them down to produce the wood used in making furniture, and offering consumers a product at a lower price and cost compared with wood prices, as well as recycling.
Islam was able to provide job opportunities for craftsmen working in blacksmithing, upholstery and other trades, according to demand, and he says in his conversation with us: “I did not imagine that the idea of recycling barrels into furniture would achieve this success, and it is in abundant demand in cafés, but at the company we developed their shapes so that they attract families and are used as an alternative to wooden furniture.”
Egypt launched the 100 Million Trees initiative, coinciding with the launch of the 27th session of the climate conference that Egypt hosted in 2022. The initiative aimed to distribute trees over an area of 6,600 feddans in order to turn them into forests and increase the per capita share of green spaces, estimated at 1.2 square metres per person, in addition to reducing carbon emissions by 20% of Egypt’s total annual emissions.
In recent months, social media platforms erupted in anger over what Egyptians called “tree massacres or tree slaughter“, as a result of the excessive cutting of trees, which the government justified as being for widening roads and allocating spaces to build bridges. The tree massacres in Egypt began in 2014, on the pretext of widening roads and urban development. Referring to a report published by Zawia3, in which it traced the waves of slaughter and their impact on the per capita share of green spaces, in the period from 2013 to 2023 Egypt lost more than five million and about 60,000 square metres of tree cover, which has declined since 2000 by 0.33% of green spaces. The report points to the decline of the per capita share of green spaces in Egypt to 17 cm, while the recommendations of the World Health Organization stress that the per capita share should be nine square metres, which contradicts Egypt’s Vision 2030 strategy for sustainable development and violates the goals of the “Get Ready for Green” initiative, which calls for afforestation and stresses its importance in confronting the phenomenon of global warming waves.
During the period from 2001 to 2023, Egypt lost about 4,472.6 feddans of green spaces from its tree cover, representing 1.2% of the total area of trees. As for 95% of the lost trees, they were slaughtered as a result of the deliberate removal of trees, whether due to urban expansion or other activities, and this loss led to the release of about 553,000 tonnes of carbon emissions during this period. These figures highlight the environmental challenges Egypt faces regarding the preservation of its tree cover, especially with increasing urban activity.
The information points to a decline in green spaces in the major cities, especially Cairo and Alexandria, as a result of urban expansion and tree removal: Cairo lost about 910,894 square metres of tree cover between 2017 and 2020, while the Heliopolis area lost about 272,274 square metres of green spaces. As for the Nasr City area, it lost 311,283 square metres of tree cover. Alexandria suffered the loss of about 36% of its green spaces between 2013 and 2023, estimated at about 2.92 million square metres.
The “Shagarha” initiative has been one of the most prominent independent tree-planting initiatives in Egypt; its activity included qualifying and training young people in planting rooftops and balconies and planting fruit trees, and it was launched by Omar El-Deeb in 2016.
The initiative succeeded in planting 35,000 fruit trees during 2022, and the total number of trees planted in the period from 2016 to 2024 exceeded 350,000 fruit trees, distributed across 17 Egyptian governorates, in addition to planting 10,000 rooftops and balconies. Those who joined the initiative included 180 schools and universities and 200 Egyptian and international institutions, and Shagarha took part in 800 tree-planting events.
El-Deeb says in his conversation with Zawia3: “I feel happy when I see people eating from the fruit trees that we planted through the initiative.”
Commenting, economic expert Rashad Abdo points to the possibility of transforming all economic projects in various sectors in favour of the environment, noting the need for local production to move towards making eco-friendly products so that export routes abroad open up for them. He adds during his conversation with Zawia3: “Every sector can be transformed to become eco-friendly, and the best thing the authorities have put forward to push the green economy forward is the issuance of environmental bonds.”
Abdo also advises that the manufacture of plastic bags in Egypt must stop, given their negative impact on the environment and on people’s health. According to official reports, the volume of plastic waste in the period from 2022 to 2023 reached 2.5 million tonnes.
According to the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, which specialises in contemporary Middle East issues, Egypt is among the worst environmental polluters in the region in some sectors, while estimates point to global changes appearing in Egypt with evident speed compared with other countries, in addition to Egypt being located in a region where temperatures are rising faster than the average global temperature rise.
Initiatives that offer eco-friendly products stand out as innovative solutions that combine economic sustainability and environmental protection. In light of increasing environmental challenges and climate change, through turning agricultural and industrial waste into useful products, these initiatives contribute to reducing the volume of pollution, supporting the circular economy and the green economy, and they enhance society’s awareness of the importance of sustainability. Moreover, these projects provide diverse job opportunities, which supports local communities and promotes sustainable development. By adopting and expanding these initiatives, it is possible to build a more sustainable and prosperous future that combines preserving the environment with meeting the economic needs of society.
Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that the volume of waste from plastic bags reached 2.5 tonnes in the period from 2022 to 2023; the correct position is that the volume of plastic waste in Egypt reached 2.5 million tonnes during 2022-2023, according to data from the Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center.
Editorial correction: The first version of the report stated that Blumine and Reverse Resources is affiliated with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization; the correct position is that the two entities conducted the textile waste mapping study in Egypt commissioned by the organisation within the SwitchMed project, according to the project’s website.
