There are many Egyptian legislations related to the environment, including constitutional texts, laws, republican decisions, cabinet decisions, and ministerial decisions for the ministries of environment, health, housing, and others.

The most prominent of these is the Environment Law issued in 1994, which dealt with the protection of the terrestrial environment from pollution, the protection of the air environment from pollution, noise pollution and radioactivity, and the protection of the aquatic environment from pollution, whether from ships or facilities adjacent to beaches, and hazardous waste. An amendment was issued in 2009 during which Raising the value of fines, the last of 2015.

The Environmental Law included specific penalties for each type of violation, which ranged from a gradual financial fine from 100 pounds to one million pounds, imprisonment for various periods, and even temporary hard labor and permanent hard labor, stopping the licensing of violating facilities or canceling their licenses, and seizing and confiscating machines used in the violation. , with the provision of imposing any severer penalty stipulated in other laws.

The Environment Law was preceded by a specialized law to protect the Nile River and waterways from pollution in 1982, a law for natural reserves in 1983, a law for the cleanliness of squares, roads and streets in 1953, and a law for public cleanliness in 1976, and the number of laws on filling ponds and swamps reached 9 laws from 1914 until 2019.

This was represented by the issuance of 4 laws regarding the drainage of water from public places and facilities from 1946 to 1962, and a law was issued to fencing open lands and maintaining its cleanliness in 1947, and thus the number of environmental laws exceeded 22 laws, some of which were canceled and others were merged with others, as happened with the law preventing Sea water pollution with oil issued in 1968, which was incorporated into the Environmental Law.

Multiple forms of industrial pollution

The most important question remains about the effectiveness of these laws, and we mention here some articles of the Environmental Law, which did not find any scope for implementation despite its issuance 38 years ago, including Article 37 related to observing the cleanliness of garbage collection boxes and transport vehicles, and that the bins are tightly covered.

With a quick look at the garbage bins on the streets, we will not find any covered bin, despite the importance of this in preventing the spread of flies.

And in Article 46, which obliges the manager in charge of the facility to take measures to prevent smoking in closed places and to allocate a space for smokers in a way that does not affect the air in other places, and a cursory look at the cafes scattered on the streets, it becomes clear that the consumption of shisha is widespread, other than cigarette smoking.

The same article also stipulates a ban on smoking in public transportation, which is not applied in practice, despite the stipulation of a fine of between 50 and 200 pounds for the smoker.

Also what is stipulated in Article 42 of the obligation of all parties and individuals when practicing production, service or other activities when operating machinery and equipment and using alarms and loudspeakers;

Not to exceed the limits of sound intensity.

While any wanderer in the markets notices how much noise is widespread, and even inside the vegetable and fruit stores you find people calling out loudly announcing offers for some items, as well as the noise emitted by craft machines in popular areas, and the noise of wood-cutting machines in carpentry workshops and car body shops, where the workshops are located in the floors lower house.

A friend who lives in Sadat City indicated the state of stagnation after the decision to ban construction, saying that we could not sleep because of the ways of armed carpentry workers who prepared the wooden bases all night to pour concrete on them, while now we do not hear any sound.

Some may see that raising the issue of noise and smoking is a kind of luxury, compared to other types of pollution that are many and more dangerous, including pollution with toxins, whether emitted from car exhaust in crowded streets in cities, or the accumulation of car exhaust dust on the leaves of crops adjacent to highways, most notably the Cairo-Alexandria Road. Agricultural crops, for which regular washing with water is not sufficient to remove these toxins.

As well as forms of industrial pollution, whether by dumping waste in lakes;

This resulted in the spread of liver failure among the fishermen of Lake Manzala and others, and the dumping of industrial waste into the Nile River, or the pollution emitted from the chimneys of those factories;

Most notably, the cement and fertilizer factories, and the dumping of sewage waste by the residents of the villages nearby, as well as the dead animals.

Houses without toilets

Despite the issuance of 9 laws providing for the filling of ponds and swamps whose stagnant waters cause the breeding of disease-carrying mosquitoes, and the provision of laws to inform each of the sheikhs of the country and the mayor, who are the highest officials in the villages, of those ponds to the competent authorities to fill them in, and to impose a fine on them in the event of failure to report;

Data from the Government Statistics Authority indicated that there were 450 ponds at the beginning of 2021 with an area of ​​15 million square meters. During the year, only 529 thousand square meters were filled in, or 3.5% of the total area.

This is accompanied by the continuation of a phenomenon in the southern governorates, which is that rural houses do not have their own toilet, men and young people use the toilet of the village mosque, and children spend their needs next to the house, while women wait until nightfall to go to specific places in the open to relieve their needs, and some aid agencies The international community provided soft loans to some of those villages to construct toilets in homes.

Including the Belgian Institute of Cultural Affairs, CARE, Catholic Relief, and the Arab Scout Organization, UNICEF also alerted the seriousness of the problem to the health of women and children in those places.

The Village Building and Development Authority of the Ministry of Local Administration has built a number of toilets in homes in villages whenever financial resources became available to it, but the device has been canceled since 2016.

The Population and Establishments Census issued by the Statistics Authority limited the number until the 2006 census, after which it was satisfied with enumerating the population who use shared toilets, as happened in the last census of population and establishments, when the head of the Agency stated before the President of the Republic who attended the census results ceremony that there are 8.1 million people They use shared bathrooms within what are known as "shirk dwellings".

Where several families reside in one apartment with one room per family, and everyone uses one toilet, and sometimes the toilet is located on the ground floor and is used by all residents of the floors of the house. The head of the agency indicated that the highest number of users of shared toilets in Sohag Governorate is about 1.289 million people It is followed by Minya Governorate with about 1.180 million people, and Assiut Governorate with 1.127 million people, all of which are geographically located in the south of the country.

Spread of fraud and food contamination

This is related to the low rates of home connection to the sewage network in the south of the country, which is illustrated by the census data itself, with the percentage of the population whose homes are not connected to the public sewage network in Qena Governorate at 83.7%, and in the governorates of Assiut and Minya 80%, and in Sohag governorate 78%, Luxor Governorate 76%, Beheira Governorate (northern) 69%, Aswan Governorate 59%, and Sharqiya (North) and Beni Suef (South) governorates 58%.

Another issue is related to food contamination by adding hormones to accelerate the ripening of fruits, which results in swollen fruits and vegetables, but it is a mass of liquids, and there are many forms of food fraud by adding substances harmful to health to dairy and other products, as well as displaying bread uncovered in the streets, and the spread of street vendors who do not They hold health certificates.

The owner of food stores stated that most of the food commodities offered were fraudulent, and he bent a piece of biscuit stuffed with the date palm, to crumble it with the bend, saying if it did not contain real dates, it would respond to the bend.

With the rise in prices, manufacturers are forced to introduce additional materials to lower the price so that the goods can be sold.

Related to this is the slaughter of unhealthy animals outside government slaughterhouses, and even those slaughtered inside official bodies are transported in open transport vehicles, and are displayed in open butchery shop fronts exposed to insects. This is related to what was mentioned in the recent population census of 7.7 million people using shared kitchens. Within the scope of "shirk dwellings", which reduces the quality of the cleaning process and increases the chances of contamination with several families using the same kitchen.

Thus, the conditions of the Egyptian environment, especially in villages and slums, are witnessing difficult and painful conditions, and are completely different from what is reported in the air-conditioned halls of seminars and conferences and on satellite TV screens from the conditions of the Egyptian environment.