We’ve had our eyes on Greek-Israeli green architect, Elias Messinas, for a while. President of the NGO ECOWEEK (active in Greece, Cyprus, and Israel), and an environmental consultant to the Kramim Eco Village project in Israel, he’s also been busy over the past year in organizing a “green” civil engineering lecture series for the city […]
NatureMill’s urban compost bin does the work right in the house. Now there are no excuses to not composting! You already know through reading Green Prophet that you can make your own vegetable composter for only $10 worth of easily obtainable materials. With all the interest being circulated dealing with organic gardening at home, including […]
(The Arrow Ecology solid waste treatment facility near Tel Aviv processes up to 150 tons of garbage a day. Photo courtesy Chen Leopold/ Flash90) Like death and taxes, garbage is inevitable. And with environmental concerns growing, cities across the globe are searching for smarter ways to dispose of their trash. Sydney and Santa Barbara are […]
[youtube width=”560″ height=”410″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkmDZpNKnms&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]Cairo is a city with 18 million people. Most do not have a way to remove their trash. Garbage Dreams, a new film (see above), explores Zabbaleen and how they recycle garbage in Cairo. A buy-out of two waste-management firms could make the waste management business run more effectively, but impact the trade […]
If you are in the California area this winter and you care about food issues, consider heading to Hazon‘s annual food conference, from December 24-27. This is the same group running the sustainable food tour coming up in Israel. This Jewish food seminar looks at the ethics of animal slaughter, sustainable Israeli and Palestinian farming […]
Letting nature take care of itself: Instead of paying a private company to haul away elephant dung every day, caretakers at the Ramat Gan Safari outside of Tel Aviv have found that those 7 kg of dung, per elephant, per day, can save the safari water, and fertilize the plants. With 12 elephants at the […]
Although Israel and Jordan have not come to a joint stance on the Red-Dead Canal, Haaretz’s tenacious environmental reporter Zafrir Rinat reported Sunday that the two nations have banned the use of chicken manure as fertilizer in an effort to cut down a population of houseflies that thrives on manure and makes life miserable for […]
If you’re in the South today and haven’t yet seen An Inconvenient Truth, the Watermelon series of six “Green and Red” lectures at Beer Sheva‘s Ashan Hazman cafe/bookshop kicks off with a movie screening and discussion (in Hebrew) at 7 p.m. For the last few months, Ashan Hazman (The smoke of time) has gradually become […]
The massive swine flu cull in Egypt has impacted the city’s garbage collectors, the Zabaleen. Normally they fed organic waste to the pigs. Now what? Not long ago Green Prophet reported the Egyptian government’s plan to cull the country’s 300,000 pigs as panic of the swine influenza spread across the world. Now the effects of […]
This week marks International Composting Awareness Week, a week meant to be celebrated in Canada and the US, but which as far as I’m concerned should be truly global in scope. Though I’ve been in transit on the West Coast, I’ve commemorated the week by throwing my food scraps in the city issued scrap […]
The Porter School of Environmental Studies (PSES) at Tel Aviv University supports a new garden initiative: How do you stop peacocks from the neighboring garden, that just love the vegetables in your own little hard-won patch of green? Or the mole rat that happily digs its tunnels under the roots? (Especially when you firmly believe that every […]
Last year’s Eco-Israel group on a trip to the North. Photo courtesy Naomi Katz. Although winter has come to Israel belatedly in the season’s heaviest rainfalls this weekend, the ecological farm Hava Ve’Adam outside of Modi’in is now accepting applications for the fall term of its Eco-Israel program. For the uninitiated, Eco-Israel is a chance to get […]
Most of us (I hope) recycle all the plastic bottles we use. But do you also recycle the many other small plastic containers you use daily, or do you just throw them away? Cheese and other dairy containers, small salads, yogurts and the occasional hummus container used to make up a large part of my […]
If you are looking to sharpen your composting skills, banish flies, kill odors, and speed along the making of rich fertilizer for your garden, while running a greener kitchen, City Tree has the answer. This Thursday at 8 at Bialik 23 in Tel Aviv is the First Israeli Composters’ Forum. Bring a notebook and maybe […]
Compost plays an important role in this Green Prophet’s life as has been written about in previous posts, and over the years I’ve become somewhat of an advocate. I must have spoken with hundreds of people on the topic and have convinced a good many to at least try composting in their backyards, both in […]