Green Prophet | Cleantech & Environment News from the Middle East

Banded Israeli Bird Suspected of Espionage in Turkey

Julia Harte | May 19th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Travel & Nature »

A bird-brained theory: Turkish farmers suspect a European bee-eater found in their fields of spying for Israel.

When a farmer in Gaziantep province in southeastern Turkey came across a dead bird in his field several days ago, he thought nothing of it — until he noticed a band around its leg, reading “Israel Tel Aviv”, and that its “nostrils were very different from other birds’, and very wide.”

The local police station was alerted, and a police intelligence force has taken the bird away for inspection, according to Habertürk.

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Street Art Meets Castro Fashion in Shipping Containers

Tafline Laylin | May 19th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Architecture & Urban »

After a full year of planning, O*GE’s hard curatorial work at the Castro street art project in Jaffa has finally paid off. In one of the most surprising marriages of fashion, design and urban art we’ve seen to date, the Israeli-based clothing company invited more than a dozen internationally-acclaimed street artists to work with their fashion designers to create a fascinating summer collection.

But there’s more. In order to provide a showcase of both the street art and clothing, O*GE designed a pop-up shop made of shipping containers, which is currently on show at Hangar 2 at Jaffa Port just south of Tel Aviv, and the graffiti artists are manifesting scaled versions of their work that has been immortalized on t-shirts sold at Castro stores around the world.

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Getting Personal With 94 Elements – from Hydrogen to Plutonium (Video)

Tafline Laylin | May 18th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Lifestyle & Culture »

If you’re anything like me, you never memorized the periodic table and probably never will, but understanding what its symbols represent is becoming increasingly important – because many of them are running out. Enter 94 Elements, a global filmmaking project which aims to create beautiful short films that depict the every day, personal uses of each element – from Hydrogen to Plutonium.

Remember Germanium? It is used as lens coating on surgical microscopes, so one film follows an elderly man in India who reminisces about sight, lovers and childhood while waiting to undergo eye surgery. And that’s just one element. Although award-winning filmmakers are behind the project, there will also be opportunities for novices to pitch films about an element that speaks to them.

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3000 Foot Downdraft Energy Tower Planned by Israeli Professors on Mexico-US Border

Brian Nitz | May 18th, 2012 | 6 Comments | Email this

Energy »

Can the Energy Tower slated for US Mexico border create clean power and mitigate climate change? If Americans put Man on the moon, why not, argues Brian.

Professor Dan Zaslavsky and Dr. Rami Guetta from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are trying to develop an idea first patented by Phillip R. Carlson in 1975. In what is known as a downdraft energy tower, water is sprayed onto solar heated air at the top of a hollow tower. Now cooled and denser, this air falls rapidly to the bottom of the tower where it drives turbines and generates electricity. Annapolis Maryland – based Clean Wind Energy Tower, Inc (CWET) has plans to build two such towers near the US – Mexican border in San Luis, Arizona. At 3000 feet, the tower’s height will surpass Burj Khalifa, but unlike most skyscrapers, this one is designed to give more than it takes, in the form of clean electricity.

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Panoramic Power Opens Window To Energy Cloud and Supply Chain

Shifra Mincer | May 18th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Business & Politics »

electric box, panoramic power Shining a light on energy consumption.

What if industrial building managers could see exactly how much energy their building is using, where in the building that energy is going, and how much it is costing them at every moment to use that energy? How much energy could be saved?

One Israeli company is bringing a new device to market that will make all these things possible: Panaromic Power has developed a self-powered wireless circuit sensor that can collect data on energy usage, integrate it, and relay that information in real-time, through a cloud-based (SaaS) P3E platform, to a single dashboard.

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Egypt to Test Unique CSP Solar/Biomass Hybrid Plant

Susan Kraemer | May 17th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Business & Politics »

This wood waste may not look like fuel for a solar power plant, but it soon could be in Egypt.

A consortium of European governments, universities and research institutions are funding an innovative solar/biomass hybrid power plant test, coordinated by Italy’s national energy agency, ENEA. The EU is funding the pilot Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project in Egypt with 11,755,049 Euros, through the EU Seventh Framework Programme.

The project will test units that can produce electricity from two renewable sources. The solar energy is to come from a concentrating solar power technology using molten salts as the heat transfer fluid, the same way that Masdar’s Gemasolar plant in Spain works, in the first 24-hour solar power plant in the world.

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Severe Water Scarcity Could Hit Arab Region by 2015

Arwa Aburawa | May 17th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Water »

water tap shortage Although water scarcity is unlikely to lead to water waters, it is still devastating for the development and survival of any nation

The latest report by the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED), “The Green Economy in a Changing Arab World”, definitely doesn’t make for happy reading. In fact, it is positively terrifying. According to the report, Arab countries could be facing a severe water crisis as early as 2015, with the region’s estimated annual per capita water share at less than one-tenth of the global average. That would bring it to just 500 cubic metres per capita – anything below 1,000 cubic metres is considered to pose a “significant constraint to economic development, health and well-being”. All these findings point to the fact that we are slowly but surely running out of time.

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KarmSolar Prize Could Avail Solar-Powered Water Pump to Rural Egypt

Tafline Laylin | May 17th, 2012 | 1 Comment | Email this

Cleantech, Science & Technology »

A dynamic young Egyptian firm has won an $11,000 innovation prize for an off-grid, solar-powered water pump. Judges of the first HCT-Wharton Innovation Tournament held last week in Abu Dhabi were impressed by KarmSolar because their design could easily have a high impact on great numbers of people, reduce dependency on diesel, and it would be quick to roll out.

Which is exactly what the firm hopes to do with their prize money: commercialize the pump as soon as possible in order to provide highly efficient off-grid irrigation to agricultural farms in rural Egypt.

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Qatar (Still) Has the World’s Largest Carbon Footprint

Arwa Aburawa | May 17th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Climate »

According to the World Wildlife Fund’s latest report, Qatar still has the world’s largest carbon footprint

It’s been a couple of years since Qatar was awarded the ‘largest carbon footprint in the world‘ title (relative to the size of its population), but it appears little has changed since then. Despite various green initiative such as supporting local farms and ensuring that all new mosques were eco, they are still spewing record amounts of carbon for such a tiny nation. And once again, the nations next on the list were Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. It seems that old habits die hard and no more so than in the Gulf.

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Pesticides Causing Brain Damage to be Banned by Israel

Maurice Picow | May 17th, 2012 | Comment | Email this

Food & Health »

Down side of crop dusting is pesticides that cause neurological damage: photo by Alberto Denkberg/Haaretz

Air and water pollution in Israel from insecticides, oil and other petroleum-based residues from older gas stations; and other chemicals are feared to be causing neurological damage to people according to new studies. Various forms of insecticides, especially the use of insecticides containing three types of organophosphate substances will be stopped in two months by the Israel Health Ministry, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

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