Along with these “basic”  burial rites, a variety of eco-funerals are now available to let your death be ever-green. Perhaps, the most novel, and really earth friendly way of disposing of human remains is being proposed by an organization called the Urban Death Project, in which a person’s body will be turned into natural compost to be used for fertilizing gardens and food crops.

Headed by Seattle based Katrina Spade, who also heads an environmental NGO, the Echo Green Organization, the Urban Death Project involves “interning” human remains into a large three story “core”, within which bodies and high-carbon  materials are placed.

Over the span of a few months, with the help of aerobic decomposition and microbial activity, the bodies decompose fully, leaving a rich compost that can be used to fertilize crops and gardens.

While many people may object to this method of burial, from a natural and green standpoint, the actual burial process is not that much different than the coffin-less burials practiced by the Muslim and Jewish religious groups.

The burial and composting facility will  have a section where a dignified religious funeral can take place, including interning the shroud wrapped body into a bed filled with wood shavings and other organic material.

This entire process excludes the need for using poisonous embalming fluids and non environmental friendly caskets.

The Urban Death Project is being presented as a non-profit organization in which people will be asked to give donations towards a more ecological manner in which to bury human remains.

Regarding the creation of compost materials, human and animal waste products from raw sewage and farms is already being practised to create compost material.

An example of turning human “crap” into valuable compost is currently being done outside of Dubai. Taking this in mind, if human excrement can be turned into compost material, why not human remains themselves?

It’s simply taking the natural “composting process” one step further by finding a more green solution to the disposal of our mortal remains after death.

The post The Urban Death Project will turn your dead body into beetroot appeared first on Green Prophet.

Most people in the Middle East, however; due to chronic water scarcities, have seldom seen this little squiggly creature that is often found in home gardens in Europe and North America.

Known as the common redworm or earthworm, these amazing creatures are one of Mother Nature’s  biological wonders for eating their way through organic waste.

The value of this little creature in breaking down and consuming garbage has led Egypt to turn to earthworms to save its environment by literally eating their way through mountains of organic waste products.

The idea of using redworms to consume left-over food wastes, paper products and other organic based items has inspired an Israeli agritech firm, Agrolan to sell red worm colonies to people as a green way to rid them of organic garbage as well as produce valuable compost material for gardens.

Make worm-led compost

You can always get chickens to eat your organic waste, like Karin does at her city chicken coop. But if you don’t have space for chickens or goats, earthworms, the red variety is a perfect way to make your own factory for rich, nutrient compost.

Agrolan sells earthworms for about $16 a box. They also sell  all kinds of agtech equipment;  including advanced drip irrigation systems, sensors for plants,  and weather monitoring devices.

The introduction of redworms for a greener way to dispose of food wastes is a new concept for Agrolan,
which grows and sells them to people who want a more environmentally friendly way to rid themselves of garbage while producing  compost for home gardens.

“Raising worms is an educational experience that enriches the whole family; and of course they make an important contribution to the environment,  eating unwanted household trash and providing a natural source of compost,”  says Agrolan CEO Yehuda Glikman.

For a modest price Agrolan will deliver a small container “batch” of red worms, which are enough for the purchasers to start their own worm bed. Glickman adds that the worms should be kept in a dark, moist place, preferably in a clear plastic container so children can better watch the worms grow.

A worm population can double in size in a three month period. In addition to producing compost their excrement, the worms also produce liquids that are good for the earth environment they are introduced into.

More about composting and using animals to eat garbage:

Cairo Sustainably Manages Garbage with Unionized Pigs and Rag Pickers
Egypt turns to earthworms to save its environment
Make Greener Teens Through Composting

Image of worms from Shutterstock

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A new school year starts this week and, in the annual house-scan for fresh notebooks and pens, I unearth more mysterious clutter, stuff that grows like Chia Pets in underused drawers and cupboards.  You probably have the same problem: business cards from ages-ago jobs, dusty bottles of antique spices, a stack of Teletubbies paper plates (that little birthday girl is now pushing 16).

My greenest friend observed the clean-out and told me to chuck it all in the compost heap. A few minutes spent Googling, and it seems her tip is legit. These odd items might make your garden thrive:

1. Old paper business cards
2. Outdated herbs and spices
3. Bamboo skewers
4. Dryer lint
5. The contents of your vacuum cleaner bag
6. Wine corks
7. Paper egg cartons
8. Toothpicks
9. Pet hair
10. Human hair
11. Matches
12. Pencil shavings
13. Paper napkins
14. Crepe paper streamers
15. Old potpourri
16. Latex condoms
17. Nail clippings
18. Feathers
19. Dog food
20. Cardboard rolls from toilet paper and paper towels

Author disclosure: I mostly trust my friends, and my friends are mostly comedians. Have you dropped these ingredients in your own fertilizer factories with good results, or am I about to become another cautionary tale?

Image of women farmers from Shutterstock

The post 20 Goofy Ingredients You Can Actually Compost appeared first on Green Prophet.

This little critter, the common red worm, is a natural organic composting machine

Composting for improvement of houseplants and gardens and made in your backyard or even in your own living room  is a subject covered frequently in Green Prophet. Composting equipment can cost as little as ten dollars  for a vegetable compost bin  or by the help of a new turbo composter that makes home composting easier by shortening the compost processing time needed to make the finished product. An even more unique way to produce excellent organic compost from vegetable matter is to enlist the help of a creature that inhabits many gardens and is a natural born compost maker.

Known as the common red worm (eisenia fetida)  these creatures can eat their way through a large amount of organic waste matter, especially vegetable wastes from your kitchen such as vegetable and fruit peels, tea bags, leftover bread, leftover cereal, coffee grounds and paper coffee filters. The process of worm induced composting is called vermicomposting and simply involves setting up a worm bed or box  with a few hundred red worms and continuously adding waste matter to the box and letting the worms do the actual work.

The composting work these worms can do is truly amazing; and one average size red worm can “recycle” half a kilogram of household vegetable waste per day ! The worm excrement or castings is high in micro-nutrients and various trace elements that are good enriching the soil and providing essential nutrients for plants. Worms are sensitive to both light and temperature; so make sure the worm bin is away from light and kept at a temperature of between 55 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit (13 – 25 Celsius).

When removing the castings from the worm bin, be careful to make sure the worms are not injured or removed as well. Red worms or their European equivalent, European night crawlers, live about a year are are very prolific. Although they are bisexual, two worms are needed to “tango” and produce other worms which is form fertilized egg pods.

In the Middle East, these worms can be found in well watered gardens, or places that are damp enough for them, such as forests, well irrigated agricultural areas, livestock yards, etc. A small worm bin in your house or apartment should produce enough organic worm poop castings to keep your garden and house plants well fertilized for a minimal cost.

::National Geographic

Read more on composting for home and gardens:

Make Your Own Compost Bin With Mesopotamian Bricks

Israeli Turbo Composter Makes Home Composting Easy

Make Compost in Your Living Room

Make Your Own Vegetable compost Bin for $10

The post Worm Composting to Rejuvenate Your Plants and Earth appeared first on Green Prophet.

Do you keep a covered bucket in the kitchen for the organic garbage? If you do, you know only too well how awful it can smell.

Hamamit, an Israeli supplier of greenhouses and composters, offers an odor-free home composter that turns kitchen scraps into dry compost in 18 hours.

Something like the elephant dung that the Tel Aviv Safari now composts. Dumping the garbage into a compost box outside, you may have to bang on the box’s side first, to send any mice in there running.

That used to be my experience, when I had a garden with a compost box. If only I’d had one of these turbo composters. The stainless-steel container heats kitchen scraps up to 80° C, turning them over and producing good compost in less than a day.

It loads from the top, making it easy to scrape dishes and pots into it, and closes hermetically, shutting down automatically for safety when the lid is opened. There are appropriate sizes for home and industrial kitchens.

This method has the additional advantage of reducing kitchen garbage’s volume by as much as 85%, which sure makes smaller landfills.

::Hamamit

More on home composting (and dung):

• Compost Toilets
• Make Compost in Your Living Room
• Urban Compost Device

The post Israeli Turbo Composter Makes Home Composting Easy appeared first on Green Prophet.

Israel’s Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan turned down an opportunity to represent Israel as ambassador to the United Nations, according to a Jerusalem Post report. He expressed his gratitude to both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for their confidence, but decided that Israel needs him more.

This move comes hot on the heels of a fervent campaign to re-educate Israelis about food waste with a series of billboard, television, and radio advertisements, and to instill greener habits throughout the country. Environmental agencies expressed their respect for the decision.

Mr. Erdan told the Jerusalem Post that while the country could use an upsurge in its public diplomacy, he has already initiated certain “green” programs in Israel that he would like to follow through. Making this decision was not easy, but he calls the ongoing progress in Israel “the environmental revolution,” one that is the most important thing to him.

The paper reports that Mr. Erdan is one of the Likud’s most popular cabinet members, and that eschewing the ambassadorship could put him in the running for a “plum portfolio” in the next government. Otherwise, he would have been forced to sit out the next election.

PM Netanyahu is understanding of the Minister’s decision, and promises to help him succeed at implementing the reforms. These include recycling, composting, decreasing air pollution, and developing more metropolitan parks.

And though it is uncertain who will receive the next nomination, environmental agencies are thrilled about Mr. Erdan’s decision, as it reflects a genuine commitment to what he is doing.

Amit Bracha, director-general of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (Adam, Teva, V’din), told JPost that Erdan’s decision testifies to local and international environmental commitment, adding that given the numerous challenges Israel currently faces, Mr. Erdan’s dedication is very important.

The Society for the Protection of Nature (SPNI) argued in favor of Mr. Erdan’s fight to maintain beaches and free access to nature sites.

:: Jerusalem Post

More on environmental protection in Israel:

Israeli Environmental Protection Ministry to Rank Israel’s Beaches

Israeli Marine Ecologist Says Mediterranean Needs More Environmental Protection

Israel Combats Consumption With Comedian Tal Friedman

to image via Haaretz

The post Environmental Minister Chooses Greening Israel Over UN Post appeared first on Green Prophet.

It’s easier to get Israelis excited about blondes than about composting, but if you get their eco-attention using a blonde?  That’s a different story.  Atar Friedman, a beautiful young Israeli blonde with a mission, has been trying to get Israelis more conscious about waste and composting.  Now the face of a new garbage sorting campaign, Friedman says that she’s “very proud to be the dumb blonde who models garbage.”  Blending glamour with garbage, maybe Friedman has got what it takes to improve the country’s increasing trash problem.This is not the first time that Friedman has been in the public’s green eye.  A couple years ago she participated in a documentary television program called “Tzomet Drachim” (Hebrew for “Crossroads”) that showed how three people (Friedman included) reached a crossroads in their lives in terms of green living.

During “Tzomet Drachim”, Friedman participated in a composting course given by Tammy Zori at Tel Aviv’s City Tree, a green housing project that teaches urban sustainability methods.

She said that the composting course was a turning point for her.  “As part of the course, we were asked to bring in garbage from our home, and so it happened that in one moment I understood what bothered me about everything I had done until that point, including the effort focused on biology.  It was the moment when I realized how alienated and superficial the way we live and work is.  The proximity to the compost made me look inward, not just deep into the waste, but also deep into my lifestyle.”

Friedman added that “the moment I understood compost I understood everything, mostly how crazy it is to ignore the terrible damage we are creating.  Suddenly everything fell into place like a giant puzzle, because I also saw myself, my health, within this great system.  How?  Whoever deals with compost and looks at it no longer wants to bring packaging into his home and understands why food whose leftovers cannot be thrown into the composter is also food that no one wants to and should not place in his body.”

: Image via: NRG
:: Haaretz

Read more about waste and composting in Israel::
From Capitalistic Pig to Living in a City Tree
Going on a Picnic to Tel Aviv’s Garbage Mountain
Organic Waste Collection and Composting in the Works for Israeli Municipalities

The post Blondes Have More Fun Composting appeared first on Green Prophet.

Hey, are you gonna use that? Israeli residents may soon be able to put their banana peels to good use.

Organic waste – such as vegetable and fruit peels, egg shells, pits, etc. – constitutes a significant part of any household garbage bin, but it doesn’t have to. These materials are valuable stuff, which could easily be composted and transformed into fertilizer that helps plants and trees grow (instead of filling up a landfill).  But composting requires space and knowledge, and in an urban environment many people may not be inclined towards taking the time and effort to do it.

But what if it were all set up for you? What if all you had to do was separate your organic waste from the rest of your trash and your municipality would take care of the rest?

Hopefully, in Israel, that may soon be an option. The Israeli Environmental Protection Ministry is now pushing a Packaging Bill that would provide a sustainable solution for all types of discarded consumer packaging. Simultaneously, it is offering NIS 200 million of assistance (about $50,000) to local authorities to move towards “separation at the source” within the next three years.

Separation at the source means that the different types of waste (such as organic and recyclable) would be separated on the household level, in different receptacles. In order to enforce this, local authorities would need to distribute different collection bins for organic and non-organic waste.

While obviously more environmentally friendly, moving to separation at the source and using organic waste would also save the country money. Six million tons of waste are now generated in Israel each year, 75 percent of which is interred in landfills. Each ton of dumped garbage costs NIS 185 (about $40) – and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions.

Michaela Polansky, the Environmental Projects Coordinator at Urbanics, said that “what has happened over the last two years is that the local authorities have realized that something has to change. Primarily because of the landfill levy.”

Soon enough, hopefully, garbage will be put to better (and cheaper) use.

::Jerusalem Post

Read more about organic waste and composting:
NatureMill’s Urban Compost Device for Composting in Cities and Apartments
Meet Your Garden’s Best Friend, the Earthworm
Organic Waste Converter “Hands-free Food Waste System” May Work Better Than Composting

Image via: James Kamo

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The Middle East, perhaps because of its challenging environment, has seen the genesis of many environmental discoveries and techniques. Some of these are so ancient and ubiquitous that we take them for granted: domestic animals; agriculture; and of course cities. The five discoveries listed here range in age from seven thousand years to cutting-edge, and yet they all remain important today.

Irrigation qanats from Iran

Agricultural irrigation has been invented at many times and places. However, by far the earliest civilizations to use irrigation were the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

Irrigation systems in the fertile crescent were used to raise barley in otherwise arid land; they date back to at least 5,000 BC, and quite possibly earlier. Some of these systems, such as the qanats in Iran, are still in use today after nearly 3000 years of operation.

This very long history has been fraught with difficulties, and middle eastern societies have wrestled with problems of line failure, evaporative loss, and salinization. Today, for instance, Israel produces some of the most efficient point-irrigation technology in the world.

Windmills of Yadz

Windmills did not appear in Europe until the 1200s, but they are mentioned in Persian texts as early as the 600s AD, and al-Masudi’s description of Sistan in 950 AD makes it clear that they were already commonplace in that region. (It seems likely that waterwheels are also of Middle Eastern origin, but the earliest known examples are Roman.)

The vast bulk of all wind power, historically, has been used to drive sailing vessels. Still, after a millennium and a half, fixed-point wind power remains one of the most promising methods of generating clean energy.

Harvesting Fertilizer from Doves

The famous medieval dovecotes or pigeon towers of Esfahan, in Iran, are usually regarded as architectural attractions. But they are also the most visible part of a larger technology: harvesting fertilizer.The purpose of the dovecotes is to harvest nitrogen and phosphorus from pigeon droppings, and replenish the marginal soils of the region.

A related, though less dramatic technique is to graze sheep and goats over gardens after the harvest. There is an important environmental lesson here.

Just as early societies struggled to avoid using high-quality fertilizer as low-quality fuel, modern societies struggle to recycle livestock waste, while we simultaneously expend large sums on producing synthetic fertilizer.

Reforestation and Erosion Control

The Middle East was heavily deforested by the dawn of history, and combatting erosion and desertification have been constant challenges. It has long been both the birthplace and the best testing grounds for erosion control techniques, ranging from ancient terracing to modern synthetic, modular water diversion blocks.

Israel has run a particularly successful reforestation campaign in the last half-century, being one of relatively few countries worldwide to show a net gain in forest cover. Israeli immigrant Moshe Alamaro has also been one of the major proponents of aerial reforestation, using repurposed military technologies to plant seedlings in remote or hard-to-access regions.

The post 4 passive energy environmental solutions from the Middle East appeared first on Green Prophet.

My wife Amy and I (Arron) made a decision to pull our family out of the day-to-day suburban world in Australia and venture on 5-month world trip. We wanted an experience that would expose our family of 5 to new cultures, languages, foods and most importantly different ways in which other families and societies co-exist in a less consumption-oriented way.

But was this possible? One month at Kibbutz Lotan in the Arava Desert in Israel ticked all the boxes and – as we were to discover – many more.

Firstly we requested time away from school for our daughters 9 and 5. The school was very accommodating and recommended home schooling text books. Our plan was to home school an hour a day focusing on areas that we felt the kids needed to improve.

Our goal was to have the kids remain or even advance their over all academic status on return. We rented out our house, requested leave without pay from our jobs and packed our bags.

Once we decided to do it, it is was easy and nearly everyone around us commented about how jealous they were: we were taking control of our own lives.

Kibbutz Lotan is a special place 40km north of Eilat bordering the magnificent Jordan mountains.

Approximately 1.5 km long and 1 km wide it is a working Kibbutz that produces milk, dates, goat yogurt and cheeses. Its 50 members work and live towards a vision of “Jewish Renewal; Equality; Economic Cooperation; Community and Repairing the world.”

Kibbutz Lotan operates as a team with its members, full volunteers (placed by Israel’s volunteer organization) and Go-Eco Volunteers (paying student/workers). There are also a group of paying ‘Green Apprenticeship’ students studying various aspects of permaculture who also work part of the time. Ultimately all these groups work, eat and play together as part of one community.

Quickly our days on Lotan fell into a pattern. It gets hot in the desert so the working day starts early. One parent would rise early and start work. The rest of the family would soon follow. Work duties varied and were carefully selected so as to be child-safe and friendly.

On different days we might construct mud walls and houses, compost or harvest in the organic garden, or paint the children’s eco-playground. Work finished late morning, which was when we did some schooling before lunch.

The afternoons were filled with walks, reading books, playing and swimming in the beautiful shaded pool. Twice a week we were invited to lectures on the principles of ‘Permaculture’ or ‘Sustainable Agriculture.’

There really is something for everyone in the family here. We were all astounded by the free time created by having three healthy meals a day provided in the communal dining room. It was also a great social outlet.

Not having to buy or prepare food left us more time to play with the kids, and watch and help our 11 month old crawl and talk. I loved the work and lectures, and the kids picked up more knowledge than we would have expected.

I’ll be composting everything when I return and putting in a solar oven; honest the food tastes better. The kids loved all the games in Hebrew with their new friends. As Lotan is an enclosed area with virtually no cars, kids on their bikes run this place. Amy enjoyed spending time to understand life on a kibbutz through conversations with members and volunteers. Hanging with the 20’s set was great fun. The entire experience is a good change from the school drop off/corporate slog/rushed meal/bed routine.

On weekends when we weren’t playing in the sand dunes or hiking up to mountain outlooks, we would catch a bus South to Eilat to do some snorkeling in the Red Sea. This was the only time we used cash in the whole month.

Consider that when looking at the charges as it will include all food, all activities and all learning experiences. All in all a great experience where we felt like part of the community. We did it easily with a 1.5 and 9 year old and discovered many simple ways of living without wasting resources and precious time. It has helped us prioritize what’s really important.

Read more on Kibbutz Lotan:
Eco-Kibbutz Lotan Rolls Out Two Green Programs
Study Abroad at Kibbutz Lotan
Jews Celebrate a Solar Passover with Solar Oven at Kibbutz Lotan

::Family blog (Wood Auster World Tour)
::Kibbutz Lotan

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