Israel and the Environment:
Spinning Plastic Into Gold?
Haim Chertok looks at environmentalism in Israel and wonders whether we'll ever try to address the ecological impact of what we do with our garbage or will we keep on proffering the same worn out excuses.
Recycling bins have begun to appear on our streets and a new law was passed regarding returning our empties back to the shops. But is it really helping?
Israeli hi-tech, tourism, trade are all way down, but the recession has totally bypassed the production of litter. Last year Israel generated a great deal of the stuff, over 5 million TONS in fact. Estimates suggest that within two decades this will rise to 18 millions tons of solid waste a year. In spite of recent recycling legislation, most of it spottily implemented, around 90% of this non-biodegradeable detritus still gets dumped in landfills, most of them ad hoc, none of which can boast professionally planning. Who can doubt that this situation constitutes a very serious threat to Israel's underground water sources, its air quality, and to the beauty of its landscape.
Visiting American politicians are often treated to helicopter tours of the country. They're not strictly joyrides. Everyone KNOWS Israel is a small, or rather, a very small country, but seeing it all at a glance can be supremely instructive. Think, say, of a New Jersey whose southern 2/3 is a natural desert, and you have a reasonable notion of Israel's dimensions. As for that remaining 1/3, the region north of Beersheva, it already harbors around 650 residents per square kilometer. With the country experiencing an annual population increase of 2.5%--and an annual increase in per capita garbage production of 3%--by 2020 the density of Northern Israel is expected to reach 800 persons per square kilometer, making it one of the most densely populated regions in the industrialized world.
The impact of this congestion on water and air quality in this very small land has already been deleterious. A few years ago the country's most visible "landfill," actually a mountain of garbage visible from the main highway south of Tel Aviv, collapsed after heavy rainfalls. Since then most of the garbage from the country's Central Region has been transported daily to makeshift dumps in the Negev. The rest is dumped here, there, anywhere, everywhere illegally. Within another two decades even Israel's marginal sites will have reached their capacity; no additional ones are on anyone's drawing board.
And yet, in the midst of this brewing crisis, I wish to report palpable progress. This noontime I returned six, recycleable wine and beer bottles to my neighborhood supermarket. Such bottles constitute nearly 15% of the volume of all garbage that ends up in the country's dumps. The splendid sum 1 1/2 shekels was deducted from my purchase. No matter. This, more or less, is the way things should work. I noted all of four other recycled bottles piled in cartons by the cash registers. In short, up to that hour my own modest contribution amounted to 60% of the visible environmental awareness in my middle class Beersheva neighborhood. Now how can it be that so little has changed in a country which in April 2001 supposedly implemented a Beverage Deposit Law? One factor is surely the level of leadership demonstrated by current and past Environmental Ministers who seem at least as sensitive to the astigmatic arguments of manufacturers, industrialists, and developers as to those of environmentalists. Worse, no enthusiasm for environmental concerns has yet filtered down to children in the nation's schools.
A glance at any dumpster reveals that matters are even worse when we turn from glass to aluminum cans or plastic bottles. In the parking lots of my local market a large receptable for receiving plastic bottles stood for about three months. One day it simply disappeared. As if it were a mystery, the manager, when asked, proffered no explanation whatsoever. In my neighborhood of North Beersheva I know of one, just one receptable for the collection of plastic bottles.
As I compose, what confronts me from the corner of my desk is not a photo of an Angolan land mine casualty but, erect as a sentinel, a banal artifact: a 1.5 liter transparent plastic bottle. Though long-drained, it still wears the red helmet I seem to have unconsciously screwed back onto its neck. Trapped in the five rounded pouches at its base are tiny pools of brownish liquid. Its red label displays a white, stylized figure, sort of a genderless Casper-the-Ghost whose outstretched arm hovers over a cross-hatched receptacle. As if levitating, the outline of an empty container seems to float, poised to drop into the mouth of the trashbin. Upon reflection, however, the iconic point is merely cosmetic: Not "Recycle!" but "Don't Litter!"; instead of vertu, virtual reality. Or, rather, REALTY.
As if daring me to dispose of him before dispatching my duty, this nettle to conscience has, like a Swiss Guard, been standing attentively for almost a week, a reminder of an evening from the past when I entered an assembly room at a Beersheva absorption center and paused at a long table near the entrance to irrigate myself with Coke. In the midst of sipping, some patter from the Sixties burbled from the lower depths: "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem."
Unconsciously drropping the paper cup into the bin, I seated myself resignedly among fifty others at--God help us!--yet another gathering of environmentalists. And what made this meeting different from all other meetings? It was billed as the Negev's first ACCI-sponsored conclave to deal with recycling. We fifty problematics faced a panel of four.
The message? Ofer Ben-Dov, a young, fervent Greenpeacenik, demanded that we and the authorities view recycling not alone in economic term but as a matter of morality. Witty, knowledgeable Adam Tal of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (Adam Teva V'Din) underscored the absurdity of Israel, as though it were vast as Siberia, still burying 95% of its garbage. Inexplicably, the "tipping fee" for dumpers in Israel runs about 1/10 the going rate in Western Europe. It's just so very cheap to pollute. Slackly defending the Ministry of Environmental Quality was plaintive Yehudit Chorna. Her best shot--"We have so little money"--was indistinguishable from her worst--"Change takes time."
The unlikely star of the evening came from the business sector: Ram Potashnik from Aviv Plastics operating at Ramat Hovav, the industrial cesspool south of Beersheva. He passed around what appeared to be a coral-colored brick which was, in fact, a wood substitute fabricated from discarded plastic bottles. He held aloft a spool of yellow thread which, he averred, had the tensile strength of steel. It too was manufactured from Sprite, Coke, and RC empties. "The technology," he explained patiently, "is not somewhere in the future. It's here and now. All we need more of is the raw material."
Here was salvation indeed. So what was the holdup? Why did this unlikely eco-messiah, this Ram Rumplestilskin, look so dispirited as he demonstrated his miracle-wares and performed his wonders.
"We offered to donate and set up one hundred recycling bins here in Beersheva, sturdy, attractive receptacles which are now in use in progressive European cities such as Bologna. Beersheva authorities were interested until, that is, its 'Garbage Mafia,' fearful of losing some jobs, raised an objection. And there the matter rests."
So, while Israel still laces Mother Earth with plastic, what secret sourcedoes Aviv still tap to obtain raw material?
"We import our plastic bottles from Turkey. [Collective gasp] Yes, backward Turkey has managed not only to avoid burying plastic bottles but, through recycling, to export and make a nice profit on them."
Later, on the way out, I poured myself a parting swig of Coke. No one objected when I took the empty bottle with me out into the night. Four weeks later, shorn of its red miniskirt, this fluted triumph of industrial engineering remains pleasing to behold and easy to grasp. Some of them will, in the fullness of time, surely be excavated and displayed in museums as the Etruscan shards of late 20th century civilization.
After a month of dithering, Eureka descended into my cranial bin as if propelled into a flight of fancy by some saintly Casper. If our local mafiosi must prevail, if Aviv continues to rely upon the Ottomans, instead of importing crushed plastic, why not request the Turks to clean and refill old bottles with fresh spring water, of which they enjoy an abundance, thereby enhancing the value of their most peculiar export to us both? With glee I cleared the corner of my desk.
Some time later I read that Tel Aviv and surrounding suburbs, whose garbagemen are notorious sissies, committed themselves to cooperation with Aviv's recycling plan. A good thing. If Potashnik had to depend upon local recycling, Aviv Plastics would have bitten the dust a long time ago.
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Judaism and the Environment
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