No matter what form the Apocalypse ends up taking, be it Mad Max zombie-rampage or slow tedious economic decline, one thing is for certain; trash will be everywhere.

Naturally, true survivors are going to put that trash to use.  That is what survivors do, we put anything and everything in our environment to the smartest use possible.  Now when I talk about survival recycling, I’m not talking about saving soda cans and taking them to a recycling center, although that can be a good survival tactic to raise a little money in the event of a personal apocalypse that comes with losing your job in this declining economy.  Instead, what I mean is taking things that are lying around or otherwise unwanted and repairing them or finding new uses for them that were not originally intended or changing them into a more useful material or item.  Creativity is key.  And personally, the fact that people will again be forced to become very creative is one of the things that excites me most about the apocalypse!

To get a few ideas lets look at a group of people who live in something very much like a post-apocalyptic nightmare, the often persecuted but endlessly creative Coptic Christians called the Zabbaleen of the mega-city Cairo, Egypt.  The Zabbaleen, are perhaps the worlds most adept recyclers.  They go door to door with small pickups and donkey pulled carts down tight alleys where garbage trucks cannot go and collect trash for a nominal fee.  Then they take it home and have pigs sort through it to remove all the organic material.  Once the pigs are done the Zabbaleen sort through the trash and collect useful items and raw materials.  Some of it is smelted down or shredded in small scale machines and some of it is put to new uses.  Crafts and useful items are then made with the harvested materials.  Most of their income comes from what they get out of the garbage, not the small fee they charge for pick-up.

Through this distributed micro-capitalist system the Zabbaleen acheive an amazing 80% recycling efficiency as compared to the 20-25% achieved by big western corporate recyclers.  Certainly there are some negative aspects to their lifestyle, but you have to admire their creativity and tenacity to survive in a world where they suffer constant assaults by a sometimes hostile muslim majority that doesn’t care much for their pig system and a neoliberal crony business environment that keeps pressing on the Egyptian Government to steal the Zabbaleen marketshare by force.  We can certainly learn a lot from these folks, and we should because our lifestyle may one day end up resembling their’s far more than we would like to imagine!

So let’s try an exercise.  Go outside look around, and every object you see, be it a rock, a piece of broken glass, a junked car, an old sofa or a dead animal, try to think of at least three different ways you could recycle that item.  For example, a broken toaster could be fixed.  It could be made into a mirror.  The heating element could be removed and positioned between a high-temperature resistant insulator(maybe a flat stone or a piece of ceramic) and a conductor (maybe the metal wall of the toaster) to make a hot-plate.  The possibilities are endless, especially if you are willing to make a small investment in equipment to form your own micro-recycling business.

The point is to start thinking this way before you have to.  If you do this, you’ll have a huge advantage when your normal 9 to 5 paycheck is gone and the business of survival becomes very real.  Recycling could very well be your niche in a post-apocalyptic economy!