Athens to Fine Litterbugs in Olympic Clean-up

Litterbugs face on-the-spot fines under a Singaporean-style clean-up campaign launched in Athens ahead of the summer Olympics.

Tourists who drop so much as a cigarette butt or are caught disgorging chewing gum will have to pay £14 penalties. A two-time offender will be asked to hand over double that amount.

"These measures will affect everybody, be they foreign or Greek," the mayor of Athens, Dora Bakoyiannis, said yesterday.

"We are determined to keep our city clean. My answer to [litterbugs] is, why do it? There are special rubbish cans every 20 metres. If you want to get rid of a cigarette butt, throw it in one of them. Otherwise, expect to be fined."

Dog owners who allow pets to foul the streets, and people who dump rubbish in public - not least on building sites and at political rallies - will also face fines of up to €8,000 (£5,520).

The town hall has established a 620-strong multilingual police taskforce to prowl the streets.

"What we want to do is change attitudes; change the culture," a local authority spokesman, Paul Anastasi, said. "Fifteen years ago you'd see 'Don't spit on the floor' signs in buses here, because that's what people used to do. You don't see them anymore because people have stopped spitting. They've been socially disciplined."

The mayor, who took office in January last year, said the taskforce had been trained with the August 13-29 Olympics in mind, and would be able to arrest offenders.

"They will take their job very seriously. Do you know how expensive it is to remove chewing gum?" she said, adding that the city had invested in 61 machines to do the job.

A member of the ruling centre-right New Democracy party, Ms Bakoyiannis said the town hall had also spent €34m (£23m) on other rubbish collection equipment.

Although relatively crime-free, Athens is among Europe's grimiest cities. A village until the early 19th century, it suffered from some of the worst smog in Europe during the 70s and 80s. Draconian measures cracking down on polluting factories and ageing buses and cars effectively killed off the smoke cloud in the late 1990s.

As some of the world's heaviest smokers, Greeks unsurprisingly have been quick to complain that the code is too strict.

"We have a city that is a huge construction pit for the Games, with the state being responsible for piles and piles of rubbish for years now," one resident, Maria Hounda, said. "Now they want to fine us for a dropped cigarette."

But yesterday the mayor was in no mood for compromise. "Studies show that a resounding 78% of Athenians agree with these regulations. What that shows is that they want to live in a city that is clean."