Internal pinhole cracks get repaired by Curapipe’s little pig train.
Small, pin-hole leaks in water, oil, and other types of pipelines often result in substantial fluid losses as well as environmental damage. It now appears that an Israeli company CuraPipe Systems has invented a unique way to seal pinhole leaks in water and other types of piping networks.
This year’s poor olive harvest isn’t just an environmental issue: it’s a metaphor for the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Israeli Itzhak Moreno holds a sack of freshly picked, plump Israeli olives, purple and ripe for the press. For the past year, he has been toiling in an orchard off the main road to Jerusalem, waiting for the right moment to harvest his olives and produce extra virgin olive oil. But the sack he holds does not contain fruit he collected. He confiscated it from thieves from a nearby Arab village who stole his fruit in middle of the night.
“We need to guard our olives during the day, evening and night,” Moreno says. “There are a lot of Arabs around here and they come and steal olives from us. This is our reality.”
Across the mountains, deep in the West Bank, Palestinian farmer Fadel Ahmed Narwajeh looks dejectedly into his half-filled bucket of olives. Above him stand armed Israeli soldiers. But Narwajeh is actually pleased to see troops, as they are there under a Supreme Court order to protect him and his grove from Jewish settlers who have laid claims on the land and have damaged his olive trees.
Applied CleanTech’s Sewage Recycling System is turning sewage into a fertile source of energy.
It may not make for dinnertime conversation, but sewage – human, agricultural and industrial – is an enormous untapped energy source. It represents some of the world’s finest biological matter, and in America, as elsewhere, it is literally going down the drain.
Recognizing sewage as a resource and alternative source of energy, Israeli company Applied CleanTech is ready to commercialize its mechanical and chemical solution that separates sewage into raw materials like cellulose and oil.
The company further aims to collect every bit of solid waste that ends up at the water treatment plant, and recycle it into valuable raw materials.
Prof. Yair Ein-Eli hopes that one day his new green battery could be used in anything from hearing aids to electric cars.
Perhaps it was Israel’s deserts and dunes that supplied the inspiration for Prof. Yair Ein-Eli’s battery that lasts for thousands of hours and has a silicon power source that reverts back to sand when it’s spent.
The research was conducted at the Technion – Israel Institute of Science and recently published in the journal Electrochemistry Communications. The article explores how this new breed of portable electrochemical battery produces thousands of hours of charge from an abundant and non-polluting fuel source.
Reuse design? We thought Green Prophet had it pretty much covered. We’ve brought you plastic dolls converted into lamps, plastic bags transformed into wallets, beer bottles made into beads, and lots more. But the surprises keep on coming.
Reusing an abandoned movie theater as an art exhibition space? There’s an idea. An idea conjured up by the Inspire Collective (not active online since 2016 – updated 2020), an inspiring group of artists who describe themselves:
“We’re a small group of full time public artists now (for the last 7 years) working with a wide variety of mediums and organize global public art exhibitions, etc…an inspired art/activist collective in the Middle East working for a positive social climate by underemphasis of politics, economy, and dogma thru the overemphasis of art, creativity, and the dynamics human spirit that refuses to submit to oppression.
“We are people who know that cooperation is magic.”
Since the formation of the ubiquitous INSPIRE Collective (in West Jerusalem in 2003), we have helped over 700 independent artists from around the world to exhibit their works here in the Middle East.”
Their latest project was ReUse 3, an art exhibition that took place last night and transformed an abandoned movie theater on Pinsker Street in Tel Aviv into an exhibition space to temporarily house the works of 150 local and international artists.
Inspire Collective explains the mission of the exhibition as follows: “On November 19th; Are will have a social cause: whether we like it or not, abandoned and neglected spaces are a global bi-product of industrial abuse.
Due to the wasteful nature of capitalist ideologies, real world problems, like homelessness, poverty”, and social alienation never seem to get solved, yet rethinking and reusing these neglected and abandoned spaces within our own communities can help to ease these societal ills.”
Reusing these public spaces causes us to perceive these spaces without economic glasses; it helps us to see through a more social lens & potentially reverse the process of these problems around the world.”
The notion of recycling and using “kilim” or tools from another primary use is mentioned in the Mishna. Here is a paper on ancient sources and discussion on the Jewish ideas behind reuse (links to PDF).
The authors analyzing perhaps where our throwaway culture came from, write:
“Recycling itself is probably as old as – indeed, seems to be a fundamental characteristic of – the human species. The archaeological record is crowded with artifacts that display the results of recycling behavior.”
“Recycling was the result of it not always being clear what to do with garbage. Should one leave it where it was or fell, in the house, courtyard, or street, which would result very often in pungent unpleasant results; or bury it near or further away from one’s town or dwelling, requiring time and effort; or cart it to a dump, also requiring time and effort?
“While scavengers might have removed some of it for use or recycling, garbage, even in ancient times, continued piling up.
Recycling and continued use of broken implements for as long as possible, of course, reduced some problems of waste control. Ancient society was not a “waste maker” society. On the other hand, recycling and using broken implements reflected an almost inbred aversion in the ancient world to a throwaway society. Implements were either expensive, difficult to make or replace, or provided parts that might be used for recycling.
“This even resulted in a phenomenon known as “provisional discard.” “Junk” might be kept around the house until some use was found for it as a
“From analyzing the finds in “middens,” or piles of refuse, archaeologists learned that people did occasionally throw away perfectly good tools or implements.
“While trash was a function of class, and clearly, the well-to-do would make more trash and could discard objects with less concern than their poorer neighbors or fellows, they seem to have respected thrift concerning objects and implements.”
The participating artists in ReUse 3 included (drum roll):
A1one
Bafl
DEDE
lil lil
JAEone
por el sol
surianii
geerard
RADICAL BPN
FALTO
dninja
IMC
donstarkell
relish
Eclisse Creazioni Art & Photography
ant
Natashalatrasha
POE
AFK Crew
Seven Logo’s
Gatsycakes
ZUrigo
camila lash
Gorm
Yelz1
Mkan1
HOL2WEG
Stahler
Mimi The Clown
C215
fineartvaughn
Tarkinson
aka WASS
DOM?NIC
Ryan Seslow
The Rat Bat
korp
ciah-ciah
Stick-A-Thing
Loki B
Just Do It Miss Kaplan
teoz
JaxieJax
Cans Can Fly
Stelleconfuse
Simon Milligan
NOLA Rising
Silly Girl (Paris)
Aphro
Biafra Inc.
Himbaer
dellboy
Earworm
Waattt?
Neromonga
pHoG!L
Uno Blasé
SEAMOnster
VisualDirt
Langa
-TONA-
psycoholics_nyno
VinylOne
ABCNT
found around
Rene Gagnon
Kevin Soto
машка
Shameless
X-10
Jason Mamerella
The Sinna
Ame72
DeadlyDaisy
xgrimerx
GG
Funk25
hRODh
DogTired
Haevi Styles
bimimonsters
SINHA
Miss Understood
ASHK
SEVEN (LOGOS)
RedRidingHood
CONTRA
NE1
XOCH
EXEL/AK77
SeveN
ROST1
dint wooer krsna
Mr Penfold
Claudio Parentela
davaca
ICY
SOT
popay
Janene Gentile
Read about art exhibitions with an environmental focus:
White Trash, An Ecological Group Exhibition, Opens in Tel Aviv Next Week
Environmentally Focused Art at the “Farm Gallery” in Holon
ReUse: An Evening of Eco-Art in Central Jerusalem
This post was updated October, 2020 by Karin Kloosterman, with extra text and images added.
Appearing on CNBC, serial entrepreneur Jon Medved mentions the thousand or so clean tech start-ups in Israel.
He’s also talking about the tried tested and true clean tech companies: In geothermal energy, the largest in the world is Israel’s Ormat (ORA) which trades on the NASDAQ.
Medved discusses the solar companies Solel and BrightSource. Solel has been operating plants in America for 30 years. These two companies are now neck in neck, looking to provide power for 2.5 million homes in California.
Medved also talks about the Ashkelon’s IDE which builds desalination plants in 35 countries around the world. He also touches on irrigation, and Shai Agassi’s Better Place.
The WATEC conference is now on in Tel Aviv. Let’s look at some new technologies attempting to collect energy with every flush, and to detect leaky pipes with drone planes. (Above: Gadi Hareli from Leviathan- Reuters)
Imagine being able to detect leaks and water pipes and create hydro-electric power at the same time. Two Israeli companies, Arad Technologies and Leviathan Energy appear to have done this, and the result is not only the saving of millions of gallons of lost water by finding leaks in water piping, but in creating hydro-electricity from water flow pressure in the pipes at the same time.
Founded in 2000, and covered by Ari Rabinovich in Reuters, Arad Technologies, part of the Arad Group, was created by two large agricultural Kibbutzim to find a solution to chronic water loses from leaking pipes and water mains.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger returned to Israel to sign a renewable energy R&D cooperation agreement with the Israeli government and the fifth annual WATEC international water exhibition kicked off in Tel Aviv. For these stories and the rest of the nine headlines from the past week, check below.
Water
Deep sea aquaculture startup prepares for harvest
WATEC comes to town
Brazil to learn water saving from Israel for Rio 2016
Mekorot officials: Not enough funding for water purification projects
Industry
Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans Look to US-Israel Cooperation To Break Oil Dependence
Israel Going Green
Yissum Introduces a Novel, Environmentally-Friendly Method for Preventing and Affecting Biofilm of Bacteria and Fungi
UNEP Europe head ponders Israel’s ‘solar paradox’
Partnerships
California’s Governator In Israel To Sign Clean Tech Co-op Deal
The book was sold-out even before its official release on November 4, says Saul Singer, author and columnist from Jerusalem. Singer co-wrote Start-Up Nation with Dan Senor, a prominent news analyst and businessman from New York. The two take a look at Israel’s trillion dollar high-tech industry and the nation’s improbable success – against all odds.
The most amazing thing about chronicling Israel’s high-tech industry, Singer tells ISRAEL21c, is that no-one has done it before. In the book, he and Senor explore how a small country of only 7.1 million people – a nation in a constant state of war and with no natural resources – has carved out a lucrative niche for itself in high-tech on a par in scale and calibre with America’s top companies.
Tom Brokaw from NBC News has praised the book, as has the president of eBay. When ISRAEL21c was interviewing Singer and Senor, the two were busy wrapping up an article on Start-Up Nation with Bloomberg News. This followed a very successful placement on the Meet the Press TV show in the US, where Senor was recently featured.
Dow Chemical Company, a worldwide leader in the global chemical industry, and sponsor of the 2010 Dow Live Earth Run for Water, has entered into agreements with the new Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for developing cleaner, new routes for producing chemical derivatives.
The two are also looking into ways for carbon capture –a method which proposes to suck up and store greenhouse gas emissions.
Although many of the chemicals produced by the American chemical giant are used in the petroleum distilling and petrochemical industries, with much of the company’s “raw material” is coming from Saudi Arabia.
Both Dow executives and the Saudi Arabian government know they need to become involved in projects that are more environmentally friendly; especially in the energy market.
KAUST is a new graduate level academic institution that just opened its doors in September, and whose campus has been designed to be more eco-sustainable and better adapted to being located in the harsh, hot climate of the Arabia Peninsula.
Read a previous Green Prophet article about its unique architectural and environmentally friendly designs.
In addition to the joint chemical derivatives projects, Dow also plans to explore being involved in ecological projects which will be carried out at KAUST’s Research Park and Innovations Cluster. Some of these projects include CO2 capture, enhanced oil recovery, water desalination, solar energy and wind energy.
CO2 capture and storage or CCS, sequesters carbon dioxide gas that is present during the petroleum distillation process to prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
Dow for its part, appears to be getting more involved in areas dealing with the environment and the company’s social responsibility towards helping the planet after so many years of being heavily connected with the petroleum industry and its effect on the world environment.
Trying to find solutions to the water resource problems that many countries face, including Saudi Arabia, is now an important part of Dow’s environmental responsibility goals. Dow was part of August’s World Water Week, held in Stockholm, where delegates from nations all over the world met to explore ways in which countries can work together to find solutions to preserving present fresh water resources, recycling waste water, and producing fresh water from desalination and other means.
For its part, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia now has what is said to be the world’s largest desalination plant and is now able to produce 70% of its fresh water from reverse osmosis and other methods of desalination.
These will be some of the projects that both Dow and KAUST research teams will be jointly involved in within the framework of this agreement, as well as the chemical derivatives research, which hopefully will not be dedicated to the long term continuation and dependence on fossil fuels.
Five years ago this past May, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced five Israeli companies as part of his plan to create more than 800 new jobs in California. He urged dozens of other Israeli corporate executives to invest and expand their businesses in the state.
“I promised I would travel the world to sell California and find employers to provide new jobs for Californians,” Schwarzenegger told a group of more than 200 Israeli and American business leaders, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs at the Tel Aviv Hilton.
He’s baaaaack. Globes reports that the former Terminator movie actor lovingly known as The Governator is due to sign a renewable energy cooperation deal with Israel’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Labor Benjamin Ben-Eliezer.
Lebanon’s Harissa Forest is only 400 square hectares in size, but it is considered one of ten Mediterranean forest attractions from a sheer beauty and conservation standpoint.
Located on a hillside above the predominantly Christian city of Jounieh, the more than 1,000 year old forest had been threatened by real estate developers and construction contractors who wanted to include the area in a series of holiday resort developments that included a cable car (pictured above), restaurants and night clubs. But it’s thanks to the work of a church that generations in the future will get to experience this natural treasure.
Unique in both its flora and fauna, the Harissa Forest, despite its small land area, contains more than 27 endangered and 52 rare plant species, as well as 168 species of animals, 152 types of butterflies and 69 species of birds.
Most, it not all of this national treasure might have been destroyed or severely altered, had not the Maronite Church stepped in and declared the forest to be the word’s first “Maronite Protected Environment”.
The Maronite Church, an eastern branch of the Catholic Church, is one of the oldest Christian sects and has been in existence since Roman times. It’s a predominant sect of Christianity in the Near Middle East.
It owns considerable property in Lebanon, including a good portion of the Harissa Forest itself. Due to concern out of seeing this lovely natural heritage fall victim to commercial interests, the Church leaders in Lebanon, led by the Maronite Patriarch himself, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir decided to declare the forest to be a natural reserve and as such would be afforded the Church’s protection.
The Maronite Church has also become involved in helping to preserve other natural locations in Lebanon and has opened an ecology center, as well as sponsoring environmental education and action programs in more than 75 villages and towns.
The church’s actions involving preserving the environment has resulted in its being considered as one of the main environmental protectors in Lebanon, according to Martin Palmer, Chief Administrator of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC).
(Update 2019: ARC has closed down saying its work has been done.)
The Harrisa forest is just one of Lebanon’s natural sites mentioned by Green Prophet. A previous article noted work being done by activists to save the country’s historic cedars in the Chouf Cedars Forest, Lebanon’s largest cedar grove, from the ravages of climate change.
The Al Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve is a nature reserve in the Chouf and Aley districts of Lebanon. It is located on the slopes of Jebel Baruk mountain and has an area of 550 km², nearly 5.3% of the Lebanese territory, making it the largest natural reserve in Lebanon.
Another article noted efforts being made to combat forest and brush fires, which last summer alone damaged more than 15 million square meters of forest and brush land.
By being active in environmental and ecological projects in Lebanon, the Maronite Church, the country’s largest Christian sect, can be great influence on helping to preserve some of the oldest and most historic forest areas in the Eastern Mediterranean. They can set an example for the rest of the Middle East to follow.
Update in 2013: Caretaker Environment Minister Nazem Khoury announced that the Harissa Mountain area in Jounieh would be converted into a nature reserve in cooperation with the Maronite Patriarchate and the Jounieh Municipality.
“The reserve will be a major resource, not just for the residents of Kesrouan, but also for all Lebanese,” he said. The decision was announced after Khoury, caretaker Information Minister Walid Daouk and Jounieh Mayor Antoine Frem, toured several sites in the Kesrouan town.
The tour included the Green Garden project, which will be inaugurated in September, when its doors will be open to tourists and residents. Khoury also followed up on the issue of illegal entry fees at public beaches by going on a short cruise along Jounieh’s coastline.
Daouk saluted the efforts of the Jounieh municipality for developing the region and increasing its number of green spaces.
Images via Wikiloc
Artist’s view of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City
It all sounds very grandiose and really too good to be true, but a number of Persian Gulf states, including Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain and Qatar are hoping to be able to satisfy a good portion of their massive energy needs through alternative and renewable energy sources, instead of relying mostly on oil.
In a part of the world that experiences some of the hottest summer temperatures, averaging above 44 degrees Celsius during at least 4 months of the year; and whose energy growth use is growing by more than 10% per annum, these countries have their work cut out for them to be able to realize 70% of their total energy needs from alterntive and renewable energy by the year 2030.
Islam’s holy city Medina is about to become green model for Muslim world.
On November 4, 2009, UK-based the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), in working with the U.N., hosted 200 representatives from nine major world religions spanning over 60 different religious organizations. For a background, read Green Prophet’s post Interfaith Initiative plans to mobilize billions.
Baha’i, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Shintoists, Taoists and Sikhs all gathered at London’s Windsor Castle with a united environmental agenda. In an era of increasing religious divide, a once little thought of topic known as “the environment” was able to bring together ancient faith groups to discuss a modern solution.
And with Islam at the forefront of today’s news, Muslim leaders proved Islam’s ability to adapt and meet new needs.
Under the newfound coalition toward eco-commitment and a Muslim Seven Year Plan, Medina, Islam’s second most important city after Mecca, is to serve as a model green city. This move is critical since Saudi Arabia is essentially, for better or worse, presently the pillar of the Arab nations.
Nearly one month before the climate talks in Copenhagen begin, a crucial event to reach out to the eighty-five per cent of humanity who follow a religion kicked off in London’s Windsor Castle.
From 2-4 November, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon co-hosted the global gathering of inter-faith leaders: Faith Commitments for a Living Planet. The meeting has important implications for the Middle East where faith plays a dominant role in culture and society.
At the event organized by Prince Philip and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), religious leaders from all the major faith traditions highlighted the earth’s fragility, and discussed initiatives to protect it against the ravages of climate change.
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