A test looms for Egypt's new leader: Garbage

The pile of trash overwhelmed the median divider on Ahmed Zaki Street and spilled into oncoming traffic — egg shells, rotten eggplants, soiled diapers, bottles, broken furniture, junked TV sets. Flies swarmed and the summer sun baked up a powerful stench.

Then Kawther Ahmed and her mom came out to add their plastic bag of household trash. The garbage collectors hadn't been by for two days, said Ahmed, 25, and the metal trash bins in the lower-income Cairo neighborhood, called Dar el-Salam or "House of Peace," had disappeared, probably sold for scrap metal. "What can we do?" she asked.

Egypt's newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, is under growing pressure to answer that question.

He already faces a host of challenges: from secular Egyptians worried about his Islamist doctrines; from militants trying to stoke conflict with Israel, and from the poverty and joblessness that fed the Arab Spring and brought down the three-decade dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.

To all those, add the rising tide of garbage in Cairo, the world's largest Arab city. Morsi declared it one of his top five priorities, promising to clean up the streets within 100 days. In so doing, he gave the electorate a powerful way of measuring his abilities, and it looks increasingly certain that 100 days will be nowhere near enough.