Recycling grows in Israel

March 26, 2010 - 10:56 AM by

When my wife Jody and I lived in Berkeley before we moved to Israel, recycling was big business. Sorting through your trash and arranging it into categories – paper, plastic, bottles – was a daily ritual that any proper, politically correct Californian would be chastised for omitting.

Not so when we got to Israel 15 years ago. Everything went into the same rubbish bin and it all ended up in the Hiryia dump, which I’ve written about earlier. It always gave me the feeling that we were still a third world country rather than the Western economic powerhouse we positioned ourselves as.

A trip to Germany a few years ago only exacerbated my misgivings. They even had separate garbage cans in the airport, with further drilling down to distinguish between green glass and everything else.

However, recycling is on the upswing now in Israel. It began in 1999 with what are now the ubiquitous plastic bottle recycling “cages” positioned seemingly on every street corner. The program was a project of Atid Yarok, the Hamagshimim Youth Center’s green project.

Paper recycling bins are less common but we have no less than 3 of them in our neighborhood alone, divided into separate bins for regular paper and newspapers. Several years ago, the city of Jerusalem commissioned local artists to paint them with playful designs.

The country also implemented the “Deposit Law on Beverage Containers” in 2001 whereby consumers pay a 25 agorot (just under 7 cents) deposit on beverage containers between 150 milliliters and 1.5 liters. They then get the deposit back when the container is returned.

According to the Israel Ministry of Environmental Protection, recycling rates reached some 21% in 2006 (including waste from households and industry), up from only 3% in the early 1990s. The government has a target to reach a 50% rate by 2020.

There are even composting options in the country now – that’s where you set your rotting food aside to take to the local community garden and bury it along with a heaping pile of similarly stinking remains. We tried for a few months, but stopped when the stench in our house became overwhelming. I suppose we could have trucked out the garden more often.

Compost aside, recycling in Jerusalem made a big jump forward with the opening of the capital’s first central recycling center last year, where environmentally conscientious citizens can dispose of nearly all types of non-organic trash – not just plastic bottles and paper.

A number of our friends in the southern Jerusalem area have banded together to carpool to the recycling center every two weeks. Members of our informal recycling “co-op” shlep their trash to one person’s house, where it’s all packed in the car and taken across town to Givat Shaul, where the center is, just east of the central city cemetery. Last week was our turn.

The recycling center was much smaller than I imagined. There were medium-sized bins for various forms of rubbish – glass, plastic and paper of course, but also tin cans, batteries and “electronics.” In the latter were various presumably broken devices: computer printers and keyboards, telephones, toasters, even a coffee pot and a blender. I was tempted to fish out a fax machine to see if it still worked, but then thought better of it.

The center tries to make it fun for the kids. As you enter, there is a cute green frog, a green dolphin and a brown bear, all with their mouths open. Their tummies are filled exclusively with old cassettes, videotapes and floppy disks. There is also a small playground with brightly colored climbing structures for the teeniest of tots.

The staff at the recycling center are proud of their work and offer to help carry your garbage to the right receptacle. I asked what happens to the trash once it’s carted off. It goes to various recycling centers around the country, the man carrying my bag of tins explained, from north to south.

Satisfied we’d done our ecologic duty, we headed back for the car. As we left, I noticed the employee sorting through the bottles, looking for any that had a 25 agorot deposit label. Was he planning to donate the proceeds back to the center? Probably not, but I doubt anyone would complain. The very fact that this center exists is good news for Jerusalem. I actually look forward to getting my hands dirty again our next time out.

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The local Baka neighborhood administration is promoting the idea of building a second recycling depository and community garden on an empty plot of land next to our synagogue. I’m not sure if the smell wafting onto the bima during services will be entirely conducive to deep prayer, but the location is a whole lot closer and should encourage even more recycling Jerusalemites to join the jamboree.

Tags: , , • Category: Environment 

Comments

3 Comments on Recycling grows in Israel

  1. Maskil on Mon, Mar 29th 2010 12:06 PM

    2. You said “There are even composting options in the country now – that’s where you set your rotting food aside to take to the local community garden and bury it along with a heaping pile of similarly stinking remains. We tried for a few months, but stopped when the stench in our house became overwhelming. I suppose we could have trucked out the garden more often.”

    Perhaps some Israeli eco-preneur could come up with the Israeli equivalent of these “kitchen composters” available in South Africa:

    Global Worming – Worms, Worm farms, Recycling and Composting Solutions since 1999
    http://globalworming.co.za/

  2. Marvin Levant on Thu, Apr 1st 2010 10:58 PM

    3. Her is the answer to land fill capacity and to plastic…….

    epi-global.com

  3. Trying to recycle | ISRAELITY on Fri, Nov 11th 2011 9:58 PM

    4. [...] systems in Europe and the U.S., it can be frustrating to encounter, and, nay, live with the very limited recycling that happens at home in Israel. True, things have improved with the recycling cages into which you [...]

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