14,800 littering violations registered in

Amman
in first quarter of 2013
by Hana Namrouqa | May 11, 2013 | 22:55
AMMAN The Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) has registered 14,800 littering
violations during the
first quarter of this year, according to a municipality official.
Teams from GAM and the Rangers recorded the environmental violations via
surveillance cameras installed
in cars that tour the citys streets, head of GAMs electronic monitoring department,
Ali Marafi, said on
Saturday.
The control cameras have recorded 14,800 environmental violations, all of which
were littering, during the
first three months of this year, Marafi noted.
Motorists and passengers are fined JD10-JD20 for littering under Article 37,
Paragraph 12 of Traffic Law
Number 49 for the year 2008, according to GAM.
Applying the electronic monitoring system seeks to alter peoples environmental
behaviour, reduce
violations and raise awareness of the need to keep the city clean, Marafi said.
GAM started applying the electronic monitoring system in 2007 to maintain the
cleanliness of the city and
address double parking in the streets.
The vehicles dashboards are equipped with a camera and a control board
connected to a computer, where
all images of the breaches are saved then transmitted to the Central Traffic
Department and the municipality,

according to GAM.
The cameras registered 56,000 littering violations from vehicles last year, Marafi
noted.
He noted that the municipality seeks to end littering on Ammans streets,
highlighting that a campaign was
launched last year to discourage drivers and motorists from throwing trash from the
windows of their
vehicles.
Under the Amman Baituna (Amman is our home) campaign, GAM is giving out
100,000 trash bags which
are leak-proof and made of recyclable materials. Messages urging people to stop
littering are printed on the4/14/2014 jordantimes.com/print.html
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bag as well as the fine for littering under the law.
The bags are handed out at GAMs departments, at intersections and congested
traffic lights, in addition to
parks and bus stations.
Official figures indicate that each individual generates one kilogramme of solid
waste every day in Jordan,
while 16,000 tonnes of solid waste are generated daily throughout the country. In
addition, 400 compactors
are used for compressing garbage, half of which are for plastics.
Plastic bags, however, are among authorities main environmental concerns.
Ministry of Environment figures
indicate that plastic bags are dumped in alarming numbers in Jordan and pose
environmental and health
hazards. Every individual uses an average of 1.5 plastic bags per day and 500
plastic bags per year.