Wastewater must be treated beyond conventional methods used today in Israel in order to eliminate Covid-19, report scientists from Ben-Gurion University (BGU) in Beersheba, Israel. The researchers have found that parts of the coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2  survives after sewage purification in treatments plants.

They isolated RNA samples of the virus post-treatment and the finding worries them for a number of reasons.

Wastewater poses a potential threat of a renewed outbreak around the world, the researchers urge. It may not reach your homes in the tap, but sewage workers are exposed to the virus through human faeces and urine by the nature of their work. 

“If we do not want recurring waves of outbreaks, reducing the infection rate may not be enough, wastewater must be neutralized as well,” says Oded Nir of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research at BGU. 

The BGU team analyzed samples of sewage collected during the first lockdown in April, 2020 and during the second wave in July. They found ample abundance of the virus’s RNA. Most of the sewage in Israel and other developed countries undergoes biological treatment before it gets released to the environment or before the water is reused, however that was insufficient to reduce the virus concentration to undetectable levels, the researchers report.

Their findings were just uploaded to medRxiv (links to the synopsis) and will be undergoing peer review shortly. An earlier study started this spring is using the sewer and live sewage to isolate Covid-10 outbreaks on city streets.

They urge wastewater to be further treated to minimize the risk of dissemination and infection of Covid-19. In a couple of instances where wastewater was treated by chlorine, the Covid-19 virus was no longer detectable.

Protect our sewers from dangerous waste

If wastewater is left untreated, or if pipes burst or overflow from rains or winter storms in the Middle East, Covid-19 could infect people or animals who come into contact with it and perhaps create a mutated version of the virus, the scientists speculate. Covid-19 could also affect water sources if sewage is dumped in open areas.

In Israel, wastewater is collected, treated and then reused for agriculture. By the time it reaches the fields it is treated partially and called greywater which is not safe for consumption. In earlier studies in Israel (2016), researchers at the Hebrew University have reported a buildup of pharmaceuticals in the water and researchers are only now trying to understand how birth control pills, and drugs like cocaine and legal ones like chemotherapy and epilepsy medicine affect us when used in greywater to water vegetables and fruit. These pharmaceuticals also end up in treated water we drink – see Alon Tal. 

We asked Oded Nir a few more questions:

How worrying is it? “The main worry is that, worldwide, the new coronavirus is being discharged to the environment in an uncontrolled manner, which can have effects that we cannot predict,” Nir tells Green Prophet. 

“The pandemic is global, so the entire world should be worried and consider to minimize SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater effluents.

“Farmers should not be worried in particular, since wastewater effluents in Israel are chlorinated before reuse in agriculture. Overflow can be problematic but it is a short event. The continuous discharge should be taken care of,” he explains. 

“We did not study greywater. Treated wastewater leaving the wastewater treatment plant can contain traces of the virus if not chlorinated or further treatment by (for example) membranes. Around the world, these effluents ends up in rivers or lakes. If the virus traces are infectious (we are not sure yet) it could infect humans or animals, thus impeding efforts to eliminate the pandemic.”

What’s the best long-term solution in your mind to help humanity? Beyond choline. Something more sustainable?

Nir’s response: “I think the future is in applying advanced low-energy membrane filtration to the effluent. This can remove viruses completely and also reduce other bad stuff like organic micro-pollutants and heavy metals. We are currently working on such solutions in my lab.

“In this context, we are working on developing advanced membrane processes for (1) upgrading the quality of treated wastewater so it can be used in agriculture more sustainably or discharged into rivers without ecological damage. (2) recover valuable resources from wastewater, especially phosphorus which can reused as fertilizer.”

Additional researchers in the Covid-19 wastewater study at BGU include: Hala Abu Ali, Karin Yaniv, Edo Bar-Zeev, Sanhita Chaudhury, Marilou Shaga, Satish Lakkakula, and Prof. Zeev Ronen.

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In September 2012, the Israeli desert city of Beersheva became the second municipality in Israel to staff the newly created post of community gardens coordinator. The multidisciplinary position was born through fruitful cooperation between two of the city’s municipality departments – environmental and welfare, following a strategic process aimed at reinforcing local community and environmental elements while encouraging activism amongst the city’s residents. This move marks a significant shift in policy as the municipality re-defined its role over the issue of community gardens around the city.

While previously it served mainly as aid-provider to environmental organizations that initiated and operated the gardens, now the municipality controls and formulates communal gardens.

Beersheva Municipality encourages this sustainable activity using diverse resources, including conducting training programs, holding round-tables events involving the environmental organizations, and daily liaison with the local residences’ groups.

To learn more about the subject, I recently had a talk with Achikam Averbouch, who was appointed for the job of community gardens coordinator.

Averbouch, 31, specialized on ecology during his Geography master’s degree studies, and a former teacher, is highly passionate about the opportunity to promote community empowerment via sustainability.

He further explained that “There are many aspects involved in the work of community gardens coordinator such as taking care of infrastructure; oversee the work done by garden contractors; provide training for the community activists; daily interface with residents, volunteers and obviously other city officials that are assisting in the process.”

Averbouch says that a community garden is a platform that can be beneficial in multiple ways – depending on the local needs and commitment of the residents – “from growing food such as vegetables and herbs, to improving a run-down area in the neighborhood, create a lovely place for community gathering and encourage green living including composting.”

Community garden at the Center for the blind. 

Averbouch said there are two basic types of community gardens available in Beersheva:

1. Gardens that are assigned only to a specific community, for example at the absorption center for new immigrants, which is open only to the centers’ residents.

2. Public community gardens, which anyone can join.

He also told me of another fascinating use – therapeutic community gardens, designed to assist people with a spectrum of disabilities via gardening.

One such therapeutic garden is located at the center for the blind and visually impaired, where a professional guide assists the residents as they carry out the work. This garden consists of specially selected plants: bristly plants and succulents, herbs and other strong-fragrant shrubs aimed at creating further stimuli of the touch and smell senses, while growing “green thumbs”.

Community garden at the Center for the blind. Photo: Nitza Dahan

Averbouch supplies a current overview of the community gardens in the city, stating 19 gardens already established and attended to by the residents, while additional 4 groups are being formed these days by inhabitants wishing to create new gardens.

Most of the gardens are located at Beershevas’ older neighborhoods and Averbouch said one of the initial objectives he pursues is to improve the residents’ access to community gardens in other parts of the city, namely the newer neighborhoods.

Beersheva recently won the greenest municipality award, and it seems that the southern city has laid-out a plan, looking to render itself not only as greener but also as a community-oriented urban environment, promoting sustainable living. Let’s hope this lovely initiative will continue to grow.

Photos by Nitza Dahan

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Legendary American environmentalist Bill McKibben is paying the region a visit in early September. On Monday, September 7th McKibben will speak at 9.30 AM in Beer Sheva, in Israel’s Negev. Exact location TBA.

Born in 1960, McKibben founded the 350.org campaign to address the climate crisis. He published his first book as a serial in the New Yorker, later printed as The End of Nature (Random House 1989). It was one of the first climate change books printed for a wide audience.
He also writes about the limits of technology to improve our lives, which he calls the “enough” theory. From his 2003 book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age:

We’ve been told that it’s impossible – that some force like evolution drives us on to More and Faster and Bigger. ‘You can’t stop progress.’ But that’s not true. We could choose to mature. That could be the new trick we share with each other, a trick as revolutionary as fire. Or even the computer.

McKibben’s words are welcome in Beer Sheva, which has an active environmental community we wrote about here, as well as serious challenges related to sprawl and bad planning.

Beer Sheva is easy to reach by public transportation, and has a fast train link to Tel Aviv, Haifa and most cities along the coast. Mark your calendars! For more information, or to RSVP, contact Gili Baruch at gili [at] shatil [dot] nif [dot] org [dot] il.

The talk is sponsored by the Social-Economic Academy, the Paths to Sustainability Coalition, and the Heinrich-Böll Foundation.

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Memorable quote by urban planner Yodan Rofe, discussing a major Beer Sheva strip mall: “It’s the 1950s style of the U.S. A big parking lot surrounded with sh*t.”

The piece looks at some of the businessmen trying to hold their own in Beer Sheva’s Old City, a charming grid of stone-paved streets built by the Ottomans. One is Shachar Udi, above, who launched Gecko Cafe on Smilansky Street in the Old City last year in May. As recently as 20 years ago the Old City was a vibrant center of town, its streets crowded by day with shoppers and workers, by night with young partiers and older restaurant goers. But a slew of malls – both enclosed and outdoor strip-style – cut into the commerce, while the city couldn’t act fast enough to balance the two. Now Smilansky Street (below) is deserted. Read about Beer Sheva’s latest mall here.

What I found most fascinating about this piece was to understand the changing underpinnings of planning in Israel. Like many other Israeli cities, Beer Sheva was planned by European-trained thinkers. This has its ups and downs, as we explored in a post about a redevelopment scheme. Today, however, Beer Sheva represents the rest of Israel’s lunge toward Americanization, including the way developers imagine the urban landscape.

:: Photos by Daniella Cheslow

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The book begins with the 1934 Levant Fair, for which the flying camel logo (right) was developed to represent the growing Jewish community in Palestine – a camel representing the Middle East, the wings showing the Yishuv’s eye to progress.

The fair was Tel Aviv’s version of World’s Fairs going up at the time in Chicago, Paris and New York, and it showcased the Israeli adaptation of European-style Modernist buildings, adapted to give shade and shelter from the strong sun and wind in Palestine.

Contributor Zvi Efrat covers the different planning approaches used in establishing the 29 development towns along Israel’s northern and southern peripheries. These towns, planned on the most up-to-date European concepts, wound up being a terrible mismatch with the local environment, causing one architect to point out that “In Beer Sheva, where one searches longingly for traffic and commotion, for a bit of social gathering – there, in the middle of the desert, we solved the problems of London…but obviously, what is good for five or eight or ten million people – is catastrophic when you have a mere ten thousand in the desert.”

Zvi Elyahu addresses the anti-urban bias in early Israeli construction. In the 1950s, the visiting Brazilian architect Oscar Neimeyer dreamed of creating a vertical kibbutz, which would mean the entire community living in a skyscraper.

He also imagined towers soaring up from Tel Aviv’s present-day Dizengoff Center, and a set of three skyscrapers to occupy the circular park at Kikar Hamedina (plans not so far from today’s debates in Tel Aviv).

Excepting a 31-story tower at Haifa University, the rest of Neimeyer’s plans were vehemently rejected by the Zionist establishment, which sought to mark the land with Jewish construction.

“Zionism, as a national revival movement, sought to distance itself from the historic image of the dense and decrepit European city, seeing agrarian life as the basis for the creation of a modern society in a new-old land.”

One essay focuses on the distinctly kitsch form of contemporary Israeli architecture, in which buildings are constructed to draw “ironic” attention, such as a Tel Aviv performing arts center where the dressing rooms were fitted with large windows facing the street, giving the public an intimate view of the actors inside.

Another investigates Arab attitudes to Jewish environmentalism in Israel, in particular when Jewish ideas of nature preserves entail depriving Arab villages of water, electricity or communications infrastructure.

Other pieces focus on security in Gilo, a neighborhood south of Jerusalem built over the Green Line; on public housing in Israel; on the history of Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus; and on Jaffa’s struggle for identity.

In mining the planning and architectural history of Israel, Yacobi has put forth a portrait of a young country that forged a new building style to match the New Jew emerging from the agricultural communes. There is plenty of criticism of Israel’s choices in building and planning and the effects of public policy on groups like Arabs and Jews of Oriental descent, which diminishes what Israeli architecture actually achieved. However, Yacobi offers an insightful look at the roots of local attitudes to the land, which should be required reading for planners trying to change what’s already here.

(Graphics: Flying Camel logo from Stanford)

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Suburban living has made deep imprints across the Middle East, particularly in the shopping malls that have sprouted up in the West Bank and the mega-mall planned for Israel’s Beer Sheva.

In the war of 2006, Bint Jbeil was a major flashpoint between Hizbollah and Israeli troops; Hassan Nasrallah delivered an incendiary speech there. But the violent history starts earlier: Bint Jbeil was invaded by Israeli troops in the 1978 Operation Litani. From 1982-2000, Israel occupied southern Lebanon, including Bint Jbeil, following the country’s civil war.  The Daily Star reports that thousands of Lebanese left the country during the 1970s and 80s to start anew in the American Midwest, particularly Dearborn, Michigan. Since 2000, they’ve come home for summers spent in villas that remind them of their adopted home:

A walk through the avenues along these hills reveals high stone walls and massive brass gates that lead to lush green gardens surrounding these villas, evoking a high-end suburb in southern California, instead of a traditional Lebanese village that has suffered years of war and occupation.

Garbage bins stand outside the gates of each home, while a myriad of Mercedes, BMWs and Lexus SUVs trail bits of American slang behind them as they drive by.

While they have built up a suburban summer paradise, the infrastructure that keeps it all running smoothly in America doesn’t exist in Lebanon.

Readily-available electricity, hot water and air conditioning are 24/7 American luxuries that don’t exist in Bint Jbeil, making it difficult for potential returnees to imagine a permanent residence in the town.

The article is a fascinating look at another penetration of Americana into this region. However, the very things that make Lebanon unattractive as a permanent home to emigres highlight the enormous cost of maintaining neighborhoods of single-family homes.

::Map by Daniella Cheslow

::Photo from Lebanon Daily Star

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The Jerusalem Post’s Ehud Zion Waldoks covered our final meeting. As a member of the open spaces team, I went on a field trip to Rahat with Ahmad Amrani (left) who is trying to green the city. Rahat is not the first Bedouin locale to take on the environment; Darijat is Israel’s first solar village.

While many cities suffer from a lack of open space, Rahat actually has too much. Big, dusty, garbage-strewn expanses stretch along neighborhood borders. Some have been appropriated by families who built homes or shiks, shed-like structures for hosting guests. In one space, the city has been planning a giant sports complex for 10 years. While the municipality waits for funding, Rahat residents have put up a shantytown on the site.

Meanwhile, inside the neighborhoods open space is at a bare minimum. In one of them, a preschool’s garden (right) is nearly completely off limits to the children because the lot is filled with trash and even a dead cat. The sidewalks aren’t shaded. Homes are walled off with bare concrete blocks to preserve modesty of the women.

Our team (left) proposed working on a small plan for one neighborhood. We wanted to increase the sense of community for the approx. 700 people who lived in Neighborhood 22, a small wedge east of the city center. Our plan was to clear the area’s rightful open space of any invasions that weren’t for residential use; in 22, this was two shiks. We also advocated rezoning small neglected corners of housing lots in the neighborhood’s center and turning them into pocket-like parks.

I don’t know how seriously the Rahat municipality is taking our proposals; on the one hand, they came to the meeting, but on the other it takes a lot of money and willpower to clear through the bureaucratic hurdles involved in changing the very fabric of a city. Best of luck to Mr. Amrani.

If you’d like to see another side of Rahat, check out a log of a bike trip I took there earlier this year at TheTruthHerzl.com.

All photos by Daniella Cheslow. Top photo published first in the Jerusalem Post.

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According to Ynet News, “The mall’s main entrance will have three waterfalls. “The water expresses prosperity and life,” explained [architect Shem Tov] Tzruya. In addition, the mall will include a pool for collecting rain water and air-conditioner water and reusing it for irrigation, as well as use of natural illumination and solar energy.”

Developer Eli Lahav said he will also put up an 8,000 meter green park with bike lanes beside the mall, in addition to solar panels on the roof. He plans on having classes, a meeting center for youth and soldiers, and a club for elderly citizens.

In May, we reported on newly elected mayor Rubik Danilovitch’s efforts to rebrand the city. The new mall comes on the heels of a Palestinian mall trend reported in this post.

While Lahav is to be commended for getting green construction and mixed uses  into his project, they are afterthoughts tacked onto an environmentally destitute concept. The green mall will be 2 kilometers from the Old City, 3 km from the Central Bus Station and about 5 km from the heart of the major strip mall concentration on the eastern perimeter of the city. Even in places that aren’t stiflingly hot, people don’t generally walk more than a quarter of a kilometer before getting into a car if they’ve got one. Since the plan doesn’t include any housing but rather is another aiport-like flat-roofed sprawler, you can bet that its customers will likely drive there.

You can see what I’m talking about in the map below, created with Google. Point A is the new mall. B is the Negev Mall, within an easy walk of the Central Bus Station. The BIG shopping center and its neighboring strip malls are around point C, and D is the Old City.

The article in Ynet did not investigate any of these environmental issues but rather took a jovial tone of bringing money and investment to the Negev. However, in 2007 Haaretz covered the looming mall by talking to dismayed store owners in the Old City, like shoe seller Amos Peretz.

“Each new mall hurts us,” Peretz said as he arranged shoes on his store’s shelves. “The city does not need more malls. We can invest resources to improve the situation in the Old City and increase the number of parking lots, repave sidewalks, build a roof over the pedestrian zone, place more lights and connect the facades of all the businesses. We talked about it a million times already but it is not being done.”

Similar to other aspirational projects like Masdar City, this is another greenwash attempt that covers its inherent flaws with expensive technology. At the least, I would have hoped Lahav would have been more tactful than to suggest three man-made waterfalls as an environmentally sound program for a desert city in a country with a water crisis.

The post Beer Sheva Getting 100,000 Sq. Meters of Greenwash appeared first on Green Prophet.

For the last few months, Ashan Hazman (The smoke of time) has gradually become a neighborhod sustainability center thanks to the tireless work of local Matan Golan.

He put up a compost heap in the cafe’s yard, replaced the bathroom sink pipes with a bucket for collecting grey water, and made benches by slathering mud on stacks of books that couldn’t be sold.

The Watermelon Series is sponsored by Ben-Gurion University and the Social-Economic Academy (SEA) a national organization which offers lectures on social issues around the country. 

Next week’s lecture, also at 7 p.m., covers the Israeli health system and features Michael Moore’s Sicko. Other topics include the meat industry, the Israel Lands Administration reform (see GP post here), the water crisis and the rising power of Israel’s capitalist class, featuring the movie Shitat HaShakshuka.

Each lecture is NIS 10, or you can buy tickets for all six for NIS 45. For more information, contact SEA Beer Sheva Director Eyal Kosowski at eyalkoso[at]gmail[dot]com.

And if you’re in Beer Sheva all week long, don’t forget about the upcoming Eco-Thiopia festival at Earth’s Promise.

:: Social-Economic Academy (English)

:: Ashan Hazman Bookshop and Cafe (Hebrew)

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Earth’s Promise founder Isaac Hametz started the garden about a year ago as a way to help newly arrived immigrants adapt to life in Beer Sheva.

The immigrants, who come from a farming background, tend 50 plots planted with vegetables from Israel and other plants from Ethiopia.

While they plant, their children play in the garden (photo below, by Daniella Cheslow). It’s one of the few green spaces around the Kalisher absorption center.

Eco-Thiopia is on June 25 at 6:00 pm behind the Kalisher absorption center at the end of Wingate road. For more information, go to the Earth’s Promise Web site.

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