Last updated April 12, 2019
The general public in Jordan is being urged to dispose of old cell phones and other forms of outdated electronic equipment in a responsible manner, by dropping them off at designated electronic waste centers.
Local resident Sanad Abdul Rahman admits that he has simply been throwing his old electronic items away in the garbage for many years, unaware that it was the wrong to do. “I never knew that electronic waste should be separated from domestic waste,” Rahman notes. “I only heard of the term electronic waste recently.”
Thousands of citizens in Jordan continue to be just like Rahman once was, disposing of electronic waste along with their ordinary garbage and blissfully unaware that by doing so they are filling up the country’s landfills with items that can leak dangerous chemical substances into both the soil and the underground water, ultimately endangering their own health in the process, with contaminants including the likes of cadmium, lead, mercury, beryllium, and brominated flame retardants posing the biggest risks.
Now the Kingdom has its first designated electronic waste collection sites, which are located in various neighborhoods of Amman, such as Tlaa Al Ali, Basman and Al Yarmouk. “We urge people who have outdated electronic items to come to our centres and drop them off instead of throwing them away with domestic waste,” says the director of the sanitation and environment directorate for the Greater Amman Municipality, Zaidoun Nsour.