Amid the snipers, the rubble and the misery on many Syrian streets is another ugly phenomenon: garbage. In Adel’s* hometown of Janoub al Malaab, a district of Hama city, piles of waste give off an odour that is nearly unbearable.
Israeli street artist Nitzan Mintz writes her poems on the streets of Tel Aviv, using disregarded materials she collects from dumpsters and public spaces. “I use only recycled materials in my art,” she said.
About half of Abu Dhabi’s trash will ‘burn’ into green electricity in new $850 million power plant. Maybe you saw the wonderful movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Or maybe you’d read stories on Green Prophet about Masdar, or Shams, the world’s largest CSP plant in Abu Dhabi. Arab nations and their economies are certainly […]
Would innovative waste disposal devices make for tidier Jordanians? Year Two in the Hashemite Kingdom, and my honeymoon with Amman is kaput. It’s impossible to keep the romance alive when your beloved is so totally…trashy. At work, shopping for trash receptacles for a new airport terminal, I stumbled across some wacky waste bins that might’ve saved […]
Environmental campaign to rehabilitate litterbugs kicks off in Amman. Plastic bags and cigarette butts are part of the natural landscape in contemporary Jordan. Bottles roll like tumbleweed across Amman’s early morning streets. Residents say the city’s sanitation services are deteriorating, according to The Jordan Times, but towering trash and burst garbage bags, overloaded waste bins and […]
Egyptian brothers Mostafa and Mohamed Nassar have designed a clever two-meter tall waste separator that aims to make recycling in Abu Dhabi and the other Emirates “as easy as pressing a button,” The National reports.Providers of steel solutions for construction, oil and gas industries and manufacturing plants, the Abu-Dhabi-raised pair believe that collecting recyclables can be […]
Paying homage to a slower time, Turkey’s first nobel prize winning author Orhan Pamuk has immortalized the importance of everyday objects in The Museum of Innocence. Among the world’s most unique collections, the museum that opened last month in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district contains 83 cabinets full of bits and pieces collected in flea markets and antique […]
Two Israeli women founded TIPA – the first company in Israel to offer 100% biodegradable and recyclable beverage packaging, which is a particularly difficult feat to achieve. Daphna Nissenbaum and Tal Neuman founded the company in 2010 in order to address the dire need for packaging that is genuinely ecologically-sensitive. And so far, they have […]
A boy chases a ball into one of Tunisia’s 400 unofficial dumps. After the hustle and bustle of Tunisia’s capital medina dies down, the kids come out to play – in the trash! A large open area just a few blocks from the main tourist attraction, a space between two buildings has been converted into […]
There are many different kinds of pollution and many ways in which they are hijacking our children’s future. Children exposed to pollution are more likely to develop autism, attention deficit disorder, and dyslexia, according to Haaretz. These findings were unveiled by both scientists at a recent conference in Israel, and those are only the dangers […]
Superior repair skills in developing nations mean that broken electronics can be mended and reused – a much greener alternative to recycling A couple of months ago, I wrote about the death of my laptop and my predicament over what to do with it. I had become wary of sending broken electronics to developing countries […]
UAE minister reveals that Dubai is amongst the top producers of waste in the world Dubai, which is one of the seven emirates of United Arab Emirates, is no stranger to green controversy. From justifying mega malls by certifying them green to a growing market in shark fins despite a 2008 ban, the city certainly […]
Maybe blondes really do have more fun, and more fun composting too. 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 […]
A new law in Israel could mandate manufacturers to take ensure their packaging is recycled, or reused. Despite its posh upcycled art installation, a quick visit to Israel’s Hiria dump demonstrates the extent to which materials that could be recycled, and should be recycled, are instead buried. There are cages available in some neighborhoods where […]
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 […]
Bristol scientists hope to build an autonomous robot that runs by digesting energy-rich waste products As we begin to consider alternative sources of energy for the Middle East, where even oil-rich Saudi is developing its solar sector, diversifying our portfolio will take pressure off any one source and generate further safety nets. Technology developed for […]
$5 Billion couldn’t put their country back together; will Iraqis be able to pick up the pieces? What is more wasteful than war? Bomb a place, destroy its infrastructure so that ordinary citizens lack basic services, topple a few monuments important to the national identity targeted, kill several thousand people, including approximately 100,000 civilians according […]
During the week of August 30, 2009, news included that the Dead Sea is drying quicker than usual. Israeli and Jordanian scientists have come together to study and protect the Gulf of Aqaba in the south and wastewater treatment company, BPT announced that it raised $12 million. For these stories and more see the headlines […]
Hiria, Israel’s hard-to-miss garbage mountain located off the road that connects Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, has been trying to fix its trashy image and go green. It has set up a recycling park to be used as an educational tool for professionals, created clean energy out of the methane resulting from garbage decomposition, made biking […]
Instead of using synthetic sponges for your shower and dishes use a luffa! Sponges tend to collect bacteria and for heath reasons should be thrown out 1-2 times a week. But if they are not biodegradable, that is a LOT of waste filling up landfills. Additionally, the “antibactirial” sponges have a chemical called Triclosan which […]
Each week Orthodox Jews read one segment of the Five Books of Moses so that they can complete the entire Five Books within the course of a year. In this week’s Eco-Rabbi post I discuss a Jewish approach to meat. I’m a vegatarian… sympathizer. (Seriously, could you really eat lamb after looking at that picture?) […]
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 […]
Green Prophet’s stock picks: We were approached by an Israeli startup that follows and predicts stock market trends MarketGuru to execute a joint experiment: how do “green” clean technology stocks perform against the market as a whole? MarketGuru asked Green Prophet to choose a variety of environmental stocks to track their progress of how they are […]
Ilana Meallem of Arava Institute has helped initiate a project to install a bio-gas facility in the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev, to provide the villages with electricity and to help them dispose of waste in an environmentally friendly manner. A donation party will be taking place on Friday December 19th at 10:00pm in […]
Living green is about not being wasteful. If you save up a little bit at a time it adds up! David Bach in “The Automatic Millionaire” calls this the “latte factor.” In a nutshell, if you drink a latte every day it can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over forty years. But […]