While the government is promoting the construction of waste-to-energy facilities, it is interesting to know that in Jerusalem, garbage was already burned more than a century ago, and we have something to learn from this. Opinion
Dr. Yaron Blaslav, Zavit – Science and Environmental News Agency
Sometimes we tend to think that we have come up with an innovative idea, when we can learn from past experience. This tendency is also true for waste treatment. For many years, the State of Israel has been dealing with an increasingly serious crisis in solutions Waste treatmentDuring this period, many discussions were held in an attempt to find advanced solutions. To 6.3 million tons The garbage that accumulates in Israel every year. Today, about 80 percent of the waste in the country is sent to landfill, a reality that has created a real crisis at waste collection sites. In light of this trend, in the last decade the understanding has matured that landfilling is not the desired solution, and a program to recover energy from waste is being promoted in Israel. However, as in other areas, this is not about reinventing the wheel.
This is not new
A facility was recently inaugurated Waste sorting at the Evron site in the Western Galilee. The current plan is to establish a complete set of facilities in the Western Galilee, including a facility for recovering energy from waste. Last May, a tender was launched to establish the first facility To recover energy from waste in Neot Hovav in the Negev, which is scheduled to be operational in about five years. This facility is planned to be the first of five such facilities. Waste-to-energy is essentially the burning of waste in a process that creates a lot of heat that is used to produce energy. However, despite its branding as an energy recovery facility, this facility is ultimately intended for one purpose, which is large-scale controlled waste incineration.
This solution is not new. Energy recovery facilities have existed around the world for over a century. In fact, they are a late incarnation of waste incinerators, the first of which was installed in England in 1874. Today, these facilities are found on all inhabited continents. In Europe, for example, hundreds of energy recovery facilities are operating, including in the heart of advanced cities such as Copenhagen או Vienna Built as spectacular iconic buildings. An advanced energy recovery facility was also inaugurated in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 2018. The first in AfricaIt is interesting, then, that in Israel, we are only now at the beginning of the planning process for the first facility of this type.
They've done it before in Jerusalem.
At this point, many will have a historical surprise. Controlled burning of municipal waste was the method of dealing with the garbage of the city of Jerusalem even before the establishment of the state. When Britain captured Jerusalem in December 1917, its forces entered the city with a sense of holiness and grandeur. Much to their disappointment, they found a poor, miserable, and dirty city. In light of the city's special status, the British authorities immediately began developing and nurturing the city. Thus, British soldiers and officials were busy cleaning Jerusalem, while World War I continued in the north of the country.
When the war ended, and civilian life slowly returned to order, the British government was faced with the same question that is still relevant today: what to do with the city's garbage? It was soon understood that the old method of throwing garbage into the valleys around the city could not be continued. The British government, relying on many years of experience in managing various cities in Britain and throughout the British Empire, came up with the most advanced solution at the time: a garbage incinerator. This solution was considered the most advanced sanitary solution capable of "eliminating" the garbage and the health hazard it posed. Thus, the first garbage incinerator in the country was built, in the upper part of the Nahal Kidron.
Century-old photographs of the Jerusalem facility show a simple structure containing several English Meldrum Brothers incinerators and workers shoveling garbage into the incinerators, brought in by horse-drawn and donkey-drawn carts. Unlike today’s advanced waste incinerators, equipped with pollutant scavengers and equipment to monitor and control air pollution, the most striking detail of the Jerusalem incinerator was a simple tin chimney from which rose a cloud of smoke that must have been accompanied by unpleasant odors.
We should not make the mistake of concluding from the photograph that the facility was surrounded by wilderness, as the photographer had his back to the walls of the Old City and the Lions Gate. As the city grew rapidly, this location soon became problematic. Therefore, in the 30s, a new and much larger waste incinerator was built, into which garbage trucks unloaded their contents daily. The new location chosen was at the edge of the municipal jurisdiction, about a kilometer from the village of Shuafat (now in the light rail depot complex). The Jerusalem waste incinerator operated throughout the Mandate period and beyond. After the establishment of the state, when Jerusalem was divided, the incinerator remained on the Jordanian side of the city. Therefore, the Israeli Jerusalem Municipality was forced to seek new solutions for treating waste, which was eventually dumped in a landfill, while the waste incinerator continued to serve the Jordanian Jerusalem Municipality.
And in the State of Israel? For many years, the solution of incinerating waste and building energy recovery facilities was abandoned. Instead, the cheap solution of dumping waste in landfills, which were perfected in the 90s for sanitary landfills, was chosen time and again. It is important to note that energy recovery is not the ideal solution, but the optimal one among the existing alternatives. An ideal solution is to promote incentives to reduce the amount of waste, encourage reuse, separate organic waste and glass at source, and recycle locally according to the conditions of the small Israeli market. However, even after all these actions, a significant percentage of the waste will remain and a solution will need to be found for it. Therefore, between landfilling and energy recovery, the current trend should be welcomed. Better late than never.
Dr. Yaron Blaslev is an environmental historian, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Stavanger, Norway. The author would like to thank Prof. Oded Miyyas for his help in locating the site of the first crematorium in Jerusalem.
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One response
Beautiful. Unfortunately, many Arab communities do not provide a garbage removal service (payment of municipal taxes, failed management) and in almost all of them there are daily garbage fires that are very harmful to local residents and their neighbors. A pincer action must be taken from every direction, both prevention at the source, streamlining recycling methods (for example, there used to be tire recycling plants) and coupling processes as is happening in the cement industry. After doing a little from each side, we can think about what to do with what is still left – landfilling or organized transfer abroad to a place that knows how and is interested in treating the specific waste (for example, lead from batteries or waste from organic solvents).