For almost two decades, agriculturalists around the world have been sounding the alarm about the global disappearance of entire bee colonies, a vital link in the food chain whose absence is threatening the world’s food supply.  

Scientists have determined that one of the primary causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD) is the Varroa mite, a pest that attaches itself to bees as they develop in their cocoons and feeds on them, transmits viruses to them and can even kill them.

Israeli startup ToBe has developed a device that releases precise amounts of miticides in beehives to rid them of these parasites without harming the bees themselves.  

Since the early 20th century, the Varroa mite has spread from Asia to colonies of Western honey bees – the primary species used for pollination of our crops – in almost every part of the world. 

Avner Einav, VP of product at ToBe, tells NoCamels that the mites infect beehives with several kinds of viruses and cause 30 to 60 percent of colony losses every year.

“These mites don’t just affect the bees,” he says. “They affect all of us.” 

The HiveMaster emits tiny pulses of pesticide gas which ensures the treatment spreads around the hive evenly. It uses sensors and smart algorithms to understand the health of the colony and determine the activity of the bees before proceeding.

For example, it will wait to emit the miticide in the winter should it detect that the bees are cold and have a slower metabolism, which makes their immune system weaker. The beekeepers can choose whether they want the HiveMaster to emit a natural or synthetic miticide. 

“Our technology ensures that bees remain strong and support mankind’s ability to continue commercial, large-scale agriculture,” Einav says. 

The device itself simply needs to be inserted into man-made beehives. Once inside, it starts collecting and transferring data to a complementary smartphone app, where beekeepers can use it to make better decisions on the maintenance of their colonies. 

Less Is More

Even beekeepers who decide to spray miticides in their hives themselves – another common form of treatment – often overuse these pesticides and disrupt the colony due to multiple visits during the day. 

And exposure to high concentrations of pesticides have been shown to damage bees – particularly the intestines of larvae, who end up maturing as weaker adults.

“At the end of the day it’s toxic to the bees as well,” says Einav. “Beekeepers need to be able to treat the mites without damaging the bees, but it’s the biggest challenge of the industry,” he said.

Earlier this year, ToBe conducted a pilot with Wonderful Bees, one of the biggest beekeeping operations in the United States, to compare the efficacy of its device to conventional anti-Varroa treatments.

One group of beekeepers inserted strips doused in a heavy concentration of pesticides into their hives – a standard defense used against the Varroa mite today – while the other group of beekeepers used the HiveMaster device.

In the trial, the strips were coated with one gram of the amitraz insecticide, which prevents the Varroa mite from spreading when bees come into contact with it and one another. By contrast, The HiveMaster used just 0.2g of the pesticide – 80 percent fewer pesticides – which was dispersed only during specific times.

After 15 days, those who used the HiveMaster found that the treatment was 95 percent effective and that it had reduced the Varroa infestation from 4.5 percent to 0.2 percent. The pesticide-coated strips, on the other hand, were 30.5 percent effective and only reduced the infestation from 4.6 percent to 3.2 percent. 

A Middle Ground

Israel has in recent years seen the establishment of several agritech companies aiming to save the bees. Beewise, for example, has developed an autonomous beehive that can monitor the health of bees, control the environment and even harvest the honey, while BeeHero uses tiny in-hive sensors to relay real-time information and warnings on the health of the bees to farmers. 

But unlike tech-reliant startups that are still too expensive for many beekeepers, ToBe combines traditional beekeeping methods with holistic, high-tech solutions. 

According to Einav, this provides an alternative for beekeepers who want to optimize their colonies while still remaining hands on. 

“I’m a beekeeper myself, and I don’t want a machine to do all of my work,” he says.

ToBe, which was founded in 2018 and is based in the central town of Beit Berl, is currently providing its solution as a subscription service to Israeli beekeepers. Einav says it will soon be placed in 7,000 Israeli colonies – around six percent of the country’s beehives. 

It is also in the process of receiving regulatory approval in the US, Asia and Europe. 

“Any other industry related to animals now has technology that allows farmers to be more precise,” he says. “But in the bee industry, not so much.”

“And when the bees are healthy, nature flourishes.”

The post Bee Happy: New Device Protects Hives From Colony-Killing Mites appeared first on NoCamels.

A bird’s eye view of the skies above Basel, Copenhagen and Paris will reveal – aside from the spectacular views – rooftops that lately have been blooming with abundance of greenery. 

These rooftops adorned with vegetables and other vegetation are known as green roofs and have become mandatory for new and freshly renovated spaces in these European cities. 

But the systems are expensive to construct, maintain and repair, and the price of installation alone can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Israeli startup Bing Klima has developed an all-in-one green roofing system that it claims practically pays for itself – topping slate, shingle and tile with solar panels whose generated energy can offset the owner’s electricity bills or be sold to the electric grid operators. 

And these green roofs also benefit the inhabitants of the metropolis below by countering rising temperatures, preventing floods and even providing free produce. 

“Urban areas and cities are getting affected by climate change more and more,” Oded Shamir, co-founder of Bing Klima, tells NoCamels.  

“Heavy rains that can lead to floods, the urban heat island effect, biodiversity, and of course, food and energy security – they are all worsened by climate change,” says the veteran entrepreneur.

Adaptive Technology

Bing Klima uses agrivoltaics, a technique that uses the same area of land to both generate solar energy and grow crops, which is normally deployed in large agricultural fields. 

The company has produced an entire green roofing system within a single patented module, making it possible to use this method on much smaller areas like rooftops. Each unit contains a solar panel, a hydroponic growing system and a water tank, which both irrigates and anchors the entire module to the roof. 

“The combination of green roofs and solar panels lets us bring fresh produce and energy generation to the places they’re needed most: cities,” says Shamir.   

The mobile modules developed by Bing Klima are designed to be easy to install, especially when compared to other green roofs and solar panels that cannot be moved once they are constructed. 

It also operates in cold weather and in poor natural light, due to the company’s patented system.

There are numerous companies worldwide and indeed in Israel that construct solar panels and green roofs. 

But, says Shamir, there are only two other companies on the planet that combine both into a single system. And, he explains, the Bing Klima system – unlike its competitors – prevents roots from growing through to the roof and causing leaks and damage to the underlying structure. 

The startup has also installed its systems on the roofs of real estate and schools.

“Partnering with schools is amazing, because the children learn about climate change, renewable energy and urban agriculture through our systems,” says Shamir.

Greenery And Genealogy 

Founded in 2020 and located on Kibbutz HaGoshrim in the Galilee, Bing Klima honors the founders’ family history even as it moves to mitigate environmental damage. 

‘Bing Brothers’ was once the biggest toy company in the world, but its Jewish owners and Shamir’s relatives, the descendants of founders Ignaz and Adolf Bing, were forced to flee Nazi Germany to England. 

“We wanted to bring the name back so people could learn about its origin,” Shamir says. 

The company founders (also two brothers) coupled Bing with Klima – Greek for slope or region and the origin of the modern word climate – and maintained the original toy company’s logo incorporating the letters B and W (for Bing Werke). 

Today Bing Klima sells its systems to green roofing suppliers in the United States and Spain. Shamir believes more European countries should follow the Spanish example as it provides roof owners with a potential return on their investment that could pay for the system itself. 

“It’s a totally different financial model, because we bring the solar energy into the building or sell it to the grid, and this money can be used to finance the green investment,” he says.

The post All-In-One Kit Turns Urban Roofs Into Energy-Producing Gardens appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli company wants to reduce the nation’s numerous landfill sites with its organic waste disposal system.  

EcoCity Green’s solution takes a wide range of organic waste and converts it into marketable compost on site, in what company founder and CEO Erez Wolf says is a unique, low-energy, low-cost process.  

“This is the game changer of municipal waste management,” Wolf tells NoCamels. 

EcoCity Green’s drum takes the organic waste (any biodegradable material that comes from a plant or animal) and mixes it with cuttings from gardens and parks and other agricultural waste to create the compost. And according to Wolf, who calls these cuttings “dry material,” more than 500,000 tons of it is collected in Israel each year. 

Developed countries forbid the disposal of this dry material in any other way than dumping in landfills, Wolf says. This means that the EcoCity Green system not only treats organic waste, it also helps resolve another landfill problem faced by Israel, where organic waste and cuttings together account for almost half of all the waste produced inside municipal areas.

He explains that evidence of landfill sites for waste disposal dating back to 3000 BCE were found in Greece, and no one has come up with a simple, more ecologically friendly alternative since then. 

“Five thousand years later, and more than 80 percent of the garbage in Israel is being treated in the same way. This is absurd, and we came to change it,” Wolf says.

Acknowledging that the use of landfills requires large swathes of land and “ultimately costs Israel more than any other method,” the government says that most waste is disposed of in this manner due to logistical and financial restrictions.

But Wolf says that EcoCity Green has the solution to this problem. 

The 10-meter-long device weighs four tons (about as much as a minivan) and is capable of receiving up to one ton of organic waste every day, while the entire process itself takes 10 to 14 days to complete.  

What happens inside the drum to create the compost is a “secret recipe,” Wolf says, which strikes “just the balance” between organic waste and dry material. 

The system has been in use at the bustling Dizengoff Center shopping mall in central Tel Aviv since 2021, as part of the commercial complex’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2028. 

“The amazing thing is that we are celebrating two years of operating the system in the most crowded city in Israel,” he tells NoCamels. 

“We put it in the oldest and busiest shopping mall [in Israel] and we have operated it successfully for two years. We recycle locally an average weight of one ton a day of all the organic streams of the shopping mall and its one million monthly visitors.” 

The compost is even sold at a stall in the mall itself, as “organic product of the center.” 

The company was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Emek Hefer in central Israel. Wolf says that he came up with the solution while working as a strategic consultant for a large business that had waste disposal issues. 

“Everybody recycled bottles, everybody recycled plastic, everybody recycled paper, but nobody wanted to deal with the wet, green and smelly waste in their own space,” he recalls.  

“I understood the potential for making an impact and making a change in the way you look at the garbage, and make it from something you want to get rid of into something valuable.” 

Wolf highlights the fiscal benefits as well as the ecological ones, saying that the company’s solution can create a useful product while simultaneously removing waste for a fraction of the current cost. 

The average price in Israel for evacuating and treating one ton of garbage is roughly 700 shekels (approx. $180), and can even reach 1,000 shekels per ton in its financial metropolis Tel Aviv, Wolf says. His system, however, can treat the same amount of waste for about 200-300 shekels. 

“We can save a lot of money for city councils and business ventures,” he says, explaining that waste disposal is the second largest expenditure in the average municipality budget. 

The solution is not suited to individual households, he advises, adding that “we encourage you to do it yourself.” 

But it is workable on a larger domestic scale, such as for an entire apartment block that can produce as much as 30 kilos of waste daily. 

Meanwhile, the Dizengoff Center is not the only large site to sign up with EcoCity Green. The drum is in operation in 60 locations across the country.   

Furthermore, Wolf tells NoCamels, the company has just signed an agreement with Israel’s largest chain of shopping malls and will soon begin a pilot in one of its centers. 

And in a few weeks, a facility at the science park in the central city of Rehovot will begin to recycle all of the organic waste produced in their building.

With the new agreements, Wolf is another step closer to his dream of reducing the need for municipal garbage collections. 

“If we manage to take out one garbage truck in every city center in Israel, we will have achieved our aim, because we proved that they have an immediate, effective and sustainable alternative.” 

The post Compost Drum Turning Muck Into Money, Shrinking Israeli Landfills appeared first on NoCamels.

Imagine saving baby turtles just by playing your favorite online game or clearing pollution from the ocean simply by leaving a review of a new restaurant. 

Israeli startup Dots.Eco lets you do just that, teaming up with customer review websites, gaming companies and other online organizations to reward daily online interactions with steps to save the planet. 

“What we aim to do is to convert any meaningful digital action into real world environmental impact,” Daniel Madrid, co-founder and chief growth officer at Dots.Eco, tells NoCamels. 

Multiple websites have already integrated Dots.Eco into their platforms, including Tripadvisor, Google and gaming giants Playtika and Ubisoft. Users sign up for a Dots.Eco account, which gives them access to rewards through the startup’s partners. 

The company’s platform is connected to those of its partners via an Application Programming Interface (API) – a function that allows online platforms to talk to one another.  

Madrid explains that when the player reaches a certain milestone, Dots.Eco is notified via the API, so that the online interactions do in fact lead to tangible ecological steps. 

And for the companies incorporating Dots.Eco, incentivized interactions can boost their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – a common measure of performance over a set period that takes into account visitor engagement, user retention and monetization.

 “What really sets us apart is that we are on a mission to casually save the planet. We are connecting business goals to environmental impact,” Madrid says. 

The startup provides its partner platforms with various rewards options, and the partner websites allow users to pick their own reward. These rewards cover a range of green activities.

Dots.Eco says it has 150 different green projects around the world, including tree planting, removing plastic from the oceans, coral reef preservation and protecting endangered flora and fauna.  

Playtika, for example, introduced in-game rewards in its House of Fun zone, and as a result 300,000 trees were planted and 480,000 lbs of plastic was cleared from the ocean.  

Gaming studios can decide when to present their rewards, coordinating them with a player’s achievements. This means that the more you play, the more impact you can have. 

“In a game you’re playing, you reach a milestone and boom! You’re planting a tree,” Madrid says.

Some companies even take it one step further, inviting users to suggest environmentally beneficial activities they believe are important. 

“They’re involving the community, making them part of it even before the environmental rewards are yet available in the game,” explains Madrid. 

Dots.Eco also awards certificates of ecological achievement for participants who reach certain levels of environmental activity. Madrid explains that these certificates are designed to be shared on social media and a large proportion of the users are doing just that. 

“They are proud of their impact,” he says. 

The company says it works with accredited environmental organizations and experienced ecologists to ensure that the rewards they promise are both impactful and actually happen. 

These specialists provide quarterly reports and testimonials on the ground to keep users and companies updated with the work they are doing, according to Madrid. 

Among those environmental organizations is SEE Turtles, a nonprofit which offers funding and resources for the protection of endangered sea turtles in the developing world. And according to the nonprofit, their work with Dots.Eco has saved the lives of an estimated 96,000 hatchlings.  

Dots.Eco was created in 2019 as an independent gaming studio centered around what Madrid calls “play to impact.” One of their games focused on planting trees, only digitized as a gaming experience. 

“We created this company because we wanted to be a very significant player for environmental impact, and to tackle climate change,” Madrid recalls. 

But then the company caught the eye of Playtika, which was impressed by its KPI success and sought to replicate it. From there, the company began to work with other platforms to promote conservation through interaction. 

He says that while other online companies are using rewards systems as an incentive, Dots.Eco is the only one using this method purely to support ecological work. 

Last year, the company took part in an annual United Nations event called the Green Game Jam Challenge, which celebrates gaming studios who incorporate environmental issues into their platform. According to Madrid, Dots.Eco won “the two most prestigious awards” – player’s choice and the best of wildlife. 

Madrid believes that teaming up with websites that promote engagement is the best way to achieve “real, scalable and sustainable” environmental activity.  

“People in 2023 want to do more for the environment, but not everybody has time for volunteering or the means for donating,” he says. 

“But whenever you give them an easy way to make a real world impact, they will seize it with both hands.”

The post How Online Gaming And Food Reviews Can Help Save The Planet appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup has created an organic formula for protecting plants against insects and fungi using an essential oil as its base ingredient. 

BotanoHealth’s BH-B spray uses thyme oil, which co-founder and CEO Yaniv Kitron tells NoCamels has known anti-mold and anti-fungal properties.   

Pest attacks on crops are expensive. According to the US Food and Agriculture Organization, up to 40 percent of global crops are destroyed by pests each year, costing some $220 billion. 

This has encouraged the commercial use of pesticides in agriculture. In fact, the US alone says it uses roughly one billion pounds of pesticides every year – around one fifth of the total amount of pesticide used worldwide annually.

But ongoing research points to negative long-term effects of pesticides, which contain a variety of chemicals toxic to rodents and insects. As the soil absorbs these chemicals, the pesticide residue can harm future crops, livestock and even contaminate surrounding bodies of water. 

Thyme oil contains the chemical compound thymol, which acts as a natural antimicrobial agent by killing microorganisms like bacteria and fungi. 

Although it is a common ingredient in everyday products like cosmetics and mouthwash, to date it has not been widely used in large scale-agriculture for practical reasons. 

“In order to get good efficacy, you need high concentrations, high dosages. And high doses of essential oils can corrode the plant or produce,” Kitron tells NoCamels.

His company’s answer was a formulation that would boost the effectiveness of the thyme oil without increasing its concentration – and even cost less.  

“Usually fungicides based on these active ingredients will have 20-25 percent [composition] of thyme oil, where our product has 1 percent. So it becomes a much cheaper product. And the good thing is it maintains its efficacy, sometimes even more efficacious,” Kitron says. 

BotanoHealth’s unique formula uses nanotechnology known as nanoemulsion, which reduces the active ingredient of thyme oil to extremely small droplets before it is added to the fungicide mix. 

This creates a more even distribution of the oil on the plants and produce it protects. 

Natural Medicine 

The company says it only uses ingredients that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies as Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS). 

And because these ingredients have already been thoroughly vetted by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the BotanoHealth fungicide spray could go directly into the American market.

“We use the very same products that people use in their gardens. We saw the missing link was to bring those safe ingredients to agriculture,” Kitron says. 

Similarly, he says that unlike most American produce treated with pesticides, crops sprayed with their fungicide can bypass the European Union’s Minimum Residue Levels (MRLs), which dictate how much chemical residue can be left on produce. 

BH-B was also given the seal of approval from the Organic Materials Evaluation Institute (OMRI) in the US, which independently reviews products such as pesticides and fertilizers for their organic standards.

Analysis by the US Department of Agriculture found that up to 70 percent of produce sold in the United States has chemical residue from pesticides. The bulk of the pesticide market is chemical, which is why Kitron wanted to create a product that did not rely on these ingredients.

“When we compete with chemicals, there are several issues where we know we have certain advantages,” he explains. 

“There are certain crops that you cannot spray chemicals on. For example, with grapes or tomatoes or blueberries in their final week or two [of growth], most chemicals cannot be sprayed because they will decompose before the fruit reaches the consumer.”

The formula’s active ingredients are crucial to helping the thyme oil spread across the plant’s surface, something which Kitron compares to soap breaking up oil molecules and allowing them to disperse throughout water. 

In order to ensure the stability of these active ingredients, which can be volatile and quickly evaporate, the formula also includes polysaccharides – carbohydrates that help stabilize the ingredients and eliminate the pungent odor that can come with their evaporation. 

The fungicide targets gray mold and powdery mildew. During its latest field trial in Spain, using the spray retained more than 20 percent more produce than chemical pesticides. 

Furthermore, Kitron says, the fungicide can remain active for up to two weeks, unlike the average chemical product that lasts for two days at most. 

The treatment is used as part of the Integrated Pest Management (IPM) program, which takes into account the life cycle of pests, achieving the best results when infestation levels are still low.  

Worldwide Appeal

BotanoHealth started their online sales in 2021. The company is also currently selling in stores in Israel, the US and East Asia, and is undergoing the registration process in eight different Latin American countries like Guatemala and Honduras. 

“We started about two years ago, and the first crop that had good traction with our fungicide was medical and recreational cannabis in California,” Kitron says. 

BotanoHealth has sold an average of 10-20,000 liters of fungicide products a year and has raised almost $1 million in funding, backed by investors that include Israel’s Ministry of Economy. 

The company was also part of this year’s cohort of startups selected for MassChallenge Israel‘s four-month Early Stage Accelerator Program, in which the Jerusalem-based nonprofit provided mentorships, workshops and networking opportunities.

Kitron says that the fungicide is not just suited to modern farming methods favored by developed nations, but also less sophisticated systems in the rest of the world. 

“A very large portion of global agriculture is very simple and basic, which is what we saw in Ethiopia, India, and many places in South America,” he says.

“You will see that the person who is spraying pesticides is a 12 year old who’s going barefoot, who won’t even think about a mask. They’re spreading some generic product that’s already past its expiration date. 

“Nobody’s thinking about what it’s doing to him or all the kids watching him. It affects all of us and the food that we eventually eat – but he’s the first.”

The post Essential Oil Pesticide Keeping Crops Healthy And Organic appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is developing a way to make brand new plastic products from the moth-eaten shirts, torn pants, and other unwanted clothes that we normally throw away. 

TextRe uses synthetic fibers such as polyester and nylon from textile waste, and combines them with certain substances, including a reduced amount of plastic and other unnamed materials, in order to create plastic pellets.  

The startup says the process can be seamlessly integrated into the production lines of plastic manufacturing companies, who will mix the pellets with virgin polymers and ultimately produce a more sustainably sourced plastic product. 

“Our purpose is to replace the use of virgin materials with recycled ones, and receive the best characteristics [like elasticity and durability] that we can,” Lee Cohen, co-founder and CEO of TextRe, tells NoCamels. 

If Looks Could Kill

Of the estimated 100 billion garments produced worldwide every year, close to 92 million tons end up in landfills, according to illuminem, a platform that monitors businesses’ performance on sustainability and ethical issues.

Just one percent of these garments are recycled and around 12 percent are turned into lower quality products such as cleaning cloths, carpet padding and sound insulation. 

The rest could take hundreds of years to decompose, harming the environment in the process.

To recycle them, synthetic fibers are separated from the piece of clothing, shredded into small pieces of plastic, and then melted down, usually to spin new yarn. 

However, few items of clothing are recycled because each one is made of a different combination of synthetic and natural fibers, in addition to having various accessories like studs, zippers and buttons. 

These factors make it a challenge to separate the synthetic fibers from the garment for effective recycling, and the process today is labor-intensive and slow. 

But if the materials are not properly separated from one another, they cannot easily be recycled. 

“It’s a big challenge, because technology has not developed enough to accurately separate the fibers,” explains Cohen.

With TextRe, however, the synthetic fibers do not need to be so meticulously separated in order for the startup to effectively turn them into brand new products. This requires much less time and effort than if they were being recycled into a lower-quality product. 

The startup’s own tests have shown that their technology can successfully turn the separated synthetic fibers into pellets that are then injected into a mold to create a new plastic product.

In fact, TextRe says it has made prototypes of several plastic pellets that can be used in new products.

“Realizing that most of our clothes are made from plastic – like polyester – made it natural to think of ways to upcycle it for plastic industry applications,” Cohen says. 

The Tel Aviv-based startup, which was founded in 2021, is now completing a proof of concept to demonstrate its technology’s feasibility. 

It is working with a leading Israeli company that produces plastic, which is testing the process on its own production lines. 

Cohen declined to disclose more about the process itself, citing company privacy. 

Castoff Challenge

End-consumers, companies, and even governments have all been increasingly seeking a solution to the textile waste problem, especially as public awareness has grown in recent years.

The European Commission is drafting at least 16 pieces of legislation that will make fashion companies take more responsibility for the environmental impacts of the clothes they produce.

These measures include a requirement for fashion companies to collect a minimal amount of their textile waste rather than discard it all. The governments of European Union member states even agreed that they should ban the destruction of unsold textiles in order to encourage more reuse and recycling.

“This is a great incentive for textile brands to find a solution that they can also earn money from,” says Cohen.  

She believes that these regulations also incentivize companies to start replacing virgin materials with recycled ones. She says, however, that there is a dearth of quality recycled substitutes on the market today that hold up when compared to new polymers – which is where TextRe comes in. 

“We were able to overcome some of the challenges within the process, given the fact that these fibers have different characteristics than conventional plastic products, which we continue to develop and improve to create valuable recycled plastic products,” says Cohen. 

There are a number of existing companies that turn textile waste into new materials. 

These include Virginia-based Circ, which uses water, pressure, and what it calls “responsible chemistry” to separate synthetic fibers from plant-based materials and turn it into high quality fiber, and German company Kleiderly, which takes clothing waste and recycles it into a sustainable alternative to oil-based plastics.

But Cohen says that solutions such as these involve expensive and unsustainable processes that consume a lot of energy – which is counterproductive to the ethos of sustainability. 

In July, TextRe was announced as one of the winners of the 2023 MassChallenge Israel core accelerator program, a four-month intensive program that helps entrepreneurs develop their nascent companies. 

In the coming months, TextRe and the other MassChallenge winners will participate in a roadshow to Boston and New York, where they will meet with investors, customers, partners, and business leaders and officials.

While the startup is primarily bootstrapped, it is presently in the process of fundraising of $2 million, and hopes to bring its product to market within the next 18 months. 

“The second largest polluting industry in the world today is the fashion industry,” says Cohen. 

“But we believe that this waste can actually be used over and over again as a raw material, instead of continuously sending it to landfills.”

The post Green Garments: Startup Turns Old Clothes Into New Plastics appeared first on NoCamels.

The next time you see a fruit fly buzzing around your bowl of apples and oranges, you should think twice before swatting it away.

These tiny insects may be the solution to a better-balanced diet and a more sustainable future in agriculture, according to Israeli startup Flying Spark.  

The Rehovot-based company, which was founded in 2015, makes healthy, natural protein alternatives using its signature ingredient – the larva of a fruit fly.

“For human beings, the best thing is animal-derived protein,” Eran Gronich, veteran entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Flying Spark, tells NoCamels. “And the fruit fly’s nutritional values are the best in class.” 

Flying Spark uses larvae from the Ceratitis capitata (commonly known as the Mediterranean fruit fly), which originates in sub-Saharan Africa. 

The company even breeds its own fruit flies to make the cholesterol-free protein powder, which it says has a high dietary fiber content and a low glycemic index. 

The powder can be used in a wide range of food products for humans, pets and marine life, Flying Spark says. It can deliver a calcium boost via your smoothie, bring more nutrition into your dog’s dinner and even improve the flavor of your goldfish’s food.  

“It [contains] the essential amino acids, minerals, iron, calcium, magnesium, vitamins, and good fatty acids,” says Gronich. “It’s really the best protein you can get.”

And Gronich says because the white substance has no smell and no taste, it can be incorporated into any product. And it is even kosher.

Fan Of The Fly

In a fruit fly’s seven-day lifespan, it multiplies its body mass 250 times, which is what initially drew Gronich to seek the insect’s potential as a sustainable protein source. 

“Why should we eat a protein derived from insects? Because it’s cheaper, it’s much more sustainable, and it’s healthier,” says Gronich. “This was the inspiration for Flying Spark.”

He says that other insects used in food, such as grasshoppers or crickets, do not come close to meeting the protein benefits and nutritional profile offered by the fruit fly. Furthermore, the company says, the quick growth cycle is unmatched in the insect world.

Flying Spark’s technology allows the company to use all parts of the larvae, enabling low-cost cultivation that conserves 99% of the water and land used in traditional livestock farming. 

As such, the powder has a significantly lower environmental impact than conventional plant-based or animal protein sources. 

Its nearly zero waste production process also means no greenhouse gas emissions, which is made possible by its large-scale, eco-friendly production facilities. 

The company grows its flies from small colonies and then harvests the eggs, which could be upwards of 350 for each female. After the eggs develop into larvae, they are grown in tray towers in a vertical farming process. 

Flying Spark cultivates its larvae in a closed environment with climate controlled rooms which eliminates seasonal constraints and allows for its year-round production process.

Just one milliliter of larvae contains some 15,000 eggs, and Gronich says that the company is “growing billions or trillions” of them at any given time. 

Sustaining Future Generations

Founded in 2015, the company currently houses its R&D in Israel and its production facilities in Thailand. It was listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in 2021. 

Flying Spark has raised around $15 million from its main investor Thai Union Group, a leading seafood producer, and other private investors. The European Union has also funded the company to the tune of 50,000 euro.

Gronich hopes their products can lead the way for a new standard of sustainability in agriculture by encouraging finding natural protein sources. 

His vision is for Flying Spark’s fruit fly protein to help replace human dependence on fish, chickens, cows, and pigs as one of our primary protein sources. 

“The meat industry is a very unsustainable industry. Basically, the bigger the animal, the more damage it causes to us and to the environment,” says Gronich. 

“If we can replace about 70 percent of the agricultural land that is going to feed those animals with our protein, that would be great,” he says. 

The foodtech company also extracts the oil from the larvae and packages it into skincare and anti-aging products. 

The oil is high in Omega-7 and Omega-9 acids, which some believe can provide moisturizing benefits to your skin. 

The company primarily sells to customers, pet food producers and cosmetic companies in Asia, and Gronich says it hopes to transition into the international business-to-consumer (B2C) market. 

He believes that the growing world population, food insecurity and climate change will ultimately lead to the same diet of bugs for the entire planet. 

“When we are nine or ten billion people, everyone will eat protein from insects because there will be no choice.”

The post Looking For Sustainable Protein? Try A Pinch Of Fruit Fly Powder appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is countering the effects of rising urban temperatures by making cities greener, with smart infrastructure that helps create green walls, roofs and pergolas to bring down the heat.

Growing urbanization has led to phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. This is when temperatures in a city increase relative to outlying areas due the impact of urbanization – such as densely-packed buildings retaining the summer heat and a shrinking number of green spaces as the population expands. 

BioShade’s green infrastructure comes in the form of lightweight PVC pipes containing a hydroponic system that feeds the plants using a water-based nutrition solution instead of soil.

The plants sprout through holes in the pipes, which can accommodate their root systems as they grow. The pipes also contain sensors that measure parameters such as water acidity and air temperature within them, to ensure that the plants are growing under peak conditions.

The sensors are connected to the startup’s platform, which uses bespoke algorithms to detail how much carbon dioxide the plants have captured, how much they have reduced heat stress in their surroundings, and even whether the plants are sufficiently fertilized.

The BioShade platform can even send alerts when a green installation is under attack from pests such as aphids. And because its sensors continuously monitor the condition of the plants, the system itself is low-maintenance, and only requires an in-person visit every six months.

“We want to create more green spaces in places where we cannot plant trees or have different kinds of urban greenery,” BioShade CEO and co-founder Peleg Bar-On tells NoCamels. 

​​“We can lower [the temperature in a small area] by about 10°C around the system, which essentially is biomimicking – or emulating the functions of – a tree,” he says.

“By growing it in this closed-loop system, we’re able to deploy it in places that don’t contain any soil, like rooftops and walls.”

Green spaces are crucial to life in a city. They can provide a cooling effect to counter the urban heat island effect by reflecting infrared radiation. Buildings, roads, and other infrastructure conversely absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition to this, greater access to green spaces has numerous health benefits, the European Environment Agency says. People in urban areas with more green space have also been shown to have less mental distress, anxiety and depression when compared to individuals living in areas with less. 

Green spaces influence physical activities, with studies showing that people with access to them are more likely to engage in exercise, and would also do so more frequently.

The BioShade team grows the plants themselves and acclimatizes them to the hydroponic system before installing them for its clients, which range from municipalities to businesses and schools.

The Tel Aviv-based startup uses different plants for different locations. For example, the greenery used on a pergola in hilly Jerusalem will need to be resistant to colder conditions, as opposed to vegetation used in the more temperate coastal region of central Israel.

BioShade already has several custom installations throughout Israel. In Herzliya in central Israel, it is currently building a structure that will provide green shade for the roof of a new school.

And as part of a pilot project with the city’s municipality, the BioShade team has created a climatic insights dashboard for the students to analyze how its system will capture CO₂ and conserve water and energy while growing the plants.

Another one of its systems can be found in the bustling Dizengoff Center shopping mall in Tel Aviv in central Israel, where the startup even hosted a delegation from Sydney, Australia to showcase the invention.

Beyond that, BioShade has embarked on pilots with the municipalities of Tel Aviv and the southern desert city of Be’er Sheva.

From Gray To Green

Installing vegetation on walls, roofs, and other kinds of infrastructure isn’t anything new, and there are dozens of companies worldwide already doing so. 

But Bar-On says that the traditional green walls produced by these companies use plastic molds filled with soil, and that over time these plants struggle to grow because there isn’t enough space for their roots, unlike the BioShade system.

Additionally, he says that this kind of green infrastructure requires far more maintenance than BioShade’s autonomous system.

More than half of the world’s population – over 4.3 billion people, or 55 percent – now live in urban areas, especially in highly dense cities. As people continue to move to cities, green spaces and all the benefits they provide are shrinking. 

And this trend of urbanization it shows no signs of slowing, as people continue to flock to cities in search of better career opportunities and greater access to education and culture. By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world will be living in urban areas, according to Our World in Data at Oxford University.

Bar-On first had the idea for the company while learning about these challenges when studying for his Bachelor’s degree in Agroecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“I started to get more into the challenges that we now face, like climate change, and the lack of greenery around the world,” he says.

“And I thought to myself, how can we receive the benefit of trees and other kinds of natural organisms in cities [that don’t have any room for them]?

He co-founded BioShade together with Ziv Shalev in 2021. The startup was first based in CityZone, Tel Aviv’s Open Innovation Lab where startups receive support to build technologies and products tackling urban challenges. 

It received an initial investment from the Cactus Capital venture capital fund, and has been bootstrapping since. 

Most recently, BioShade was a semi-finalist of the 2023 Asper Prize, a competition which recognizes startups using innovative technology to create a global positive impact.

Bar-On says that while trees remain the best organism for reducing heat stress, planting them is not always ideal.

“Unfortunately, they’re not the best solution for cities, which have become so dense and industrialized that trees might conflict with the interests of residents and other players in the urban environment.

“I say, if you can plant the tree, you should do it. But where it is not possible, then you should definitely consider other types of open greenery and vegetation cover technologies.”

The post Hot In The City? Startup Using Plants To Cool Urban Areas appeared first on NoCamels.

Up in a small northern Israeli town, a startup is growing fields of genetically engineered wheat that can withstand the challenges of climate change – but it’s not cultivating the grain for food. 

The specialized seeds yield wheat with thicker and larger stalks that are being used to create biodegradable yet durable drinking straws.

Blue Huna’s straws are made of just one ingredient – actual straw – and according to the company need just cutting and cleaning before they can be packaged and sold to customers.

But simply planting the genetically modified seeds is not enough, Blue Huna CEO Klil Benyamini Shir tells NoCamels. The company’s treatment method and knowhow are also vital to ensuring that the stalks grow thicker, stronger, and wider than the average wheat crop. 

The startup has now finished gathering its first harvest, from which it says it will be able to produce about one million straws.

Blue Huna bought the rights to the wheat strain from Dr. Roi Ben David, a winter cereals researcher at the Volcani Institute, Israel’s national agricultural research center, who developed it over the course of four years. 

Benyamini Shir and her husband, Yinon, have also developed a prototype of a new wheat combine harvester. 

These pieces of agricultural machinery normally cut the crops and beat them to shake the grains away from the unwanted stalks, which are discarded through the back of the harvester. 

This process crushes the straw stalks, which, according to Klil, aren’t really needed, let alone whole. 

The couple’s wheat combine harvester, on the other hand, will be able to harvest both the grains and the stalks in their entirety.  

“We’re aiming to use it between next March and June, which is harvest time,” she explains.

After piloting its first batch of straws, the company will start selling farmers a kit that includes their strain of wheat, the knowhow for growing it, and the machinery to harvest the grain and the straw. 

The straws will be given back to Blue Huna, which will sell them to the consumer.

“They’ll make more profit out of the same land. So ultimately, it really helps the farmers as well,” says Yinon of the plan. 

The drinking straws that are to be produced will have a diameter of six to 11 millimeters. Other biodegradable drinking straws, says Yinon, have a diameter of four millimeters at most, and are not as thick or as strong. 

The startup also says that its straws are cheaper than its competitors. A Blue Huna straw costs eight agorot (approx. 3.5 cents), while a paper or bioplastic (PLA) straw made from plant-based materials costs 10 to 12 agorot. 

The Tip Of The Plastic Mountain

Prior to founding Blue Huna in 2019, the couple worked together as part of the international sales team at a global diamond company – and while traveling for business to resort destinations such as the Bahamas and Saint Lucia, they came face-to-face with the global problem of plastic waste.

“Anywhere we were around the world, we encountered the plastic crisis – just huge volumes of plastic that I think the general public isn’t aware of,” says Yinon. “When you really live next to it, you have to ask yourself, ‘oh my god, what are we doing?’”

The pair soon discovered biodegradable straws made out of wheat stalks, which were already being manufactured in Asian countries such as Japan and China. They wondered why Israel wasn’t selling such a product, especially given that every kilometer of the country’s coastline accumulates 21kg (46lbs) of marine plastics each day, according to the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies.

Plastic waste makes up nearly half (41.1 percent) of Israel’s solid waste composition by volume – and the country only recycles six percent of that. And the problem is not just an Israeli one. 

The World Wildlife Fund warned in 2022 that as much as 23 million tons of plastic waste is washed into the world’s waterways every year, most of it from single-use products. And scientists say that at least 427 million plastic straws are polluting coastlines around the world.

Blue Huna started importing the eco-friendly straws from producers in Asia and Europe and selling it to Israeli cafes and restaurants – but customers told them that the price was too high, and that it wasn’t wide enough to hold all beverages.

The startup, which is based in Misgav, northern Israel, says its new home-grown straws will address these issues. 

Many other Israeli startups, concerned with the worsening state of the environment, have come up with innovative solutions to tackle the plastic problem as well. 

TIPA has developed compostable plastic packaging that rivals conventional plastic in elasticity and durability and is already being used by food and clothes retailers; W-Cycle creates biodegradable trays for the food industry that can compete with single-use plastics; and UBQ Materials converts unsorted household waste into a fully recyclable thermoplastic substitute, which is already being used to make hangers, shopping carts, bins, furniture, and more. 

Blue Huna has raised $500,000 in grants from the Israel Innovation Authority, the Jewish National Fund, and others, and has also received some capital from angel investors.

It is also one of 40 startups chosen by Margalit Startup City Galil, which accelerates the business development of innovative foodtech and agritech companies in northern Israel.

And according to Klil, this innovation is only the beginning of their plans for sustainable materials. Blue Huna now has set its sights on a global market, and intends to expand overseas by 2024.

“Our aim is to solve the plastic straw problem, and afterwards, we will develop more technologies and applications that will ease the single-use plastic problem,” she says.

“We do believe that we can make some sort of impact on this world.”

The post Special Strain Of Wheat Makes Durable, Eco-Friendly Straws appeared first on NoCamels.

For decades, the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) has enjoyed a monopoly on power supply in the country. But in the last five years Israel has moved to end this monopoly, and allow other companies to enter the field. 

And for one innovative solar energy firm, this means a real opportunity to make the country more environmentally friendly when it comes to power consumption.  

E.D.I Energy believes its solar power – thanks to the innovative way it is generated – can keep the lights on for up to one third of Israeli consumers. 

The company’s business plan is simple: rent space on roofs and other high-up places to place photovoltaic panels, collect the solar energy produced and sells it to the owners of the roofs – at a reduced rate – and to the IEC. 

“Our vision is to reduce the global footprint,” E.D.I founder Danielle Biton tells NoCamels. 

“We actually do something about it, not just going and telling other people what to do, like to reduce the electricity usage. We actually sell the electricity to the local grid. And I think making it happen was one of my main goals, not just talking about it.” 

The Israeli government in 2018 authorized reforms to the electricity sector, opening the market up to competition. The objective is to allow private companies to supply power to both businesses and households, cutting the IEC’s share of the market to just 30 percent. And E.D.I wants to claim a chunk of the market, eventually matching the IEC for market share. 

While just a fraction of Israel’s power comes from solar energy, the country is aiming to double its capacity by 2025 and plans to provide up to 40 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.  

Biton founded E.D.I in 2020, and credits the company’s CEO Adi Levi with giving her inspiration to do something to preserve the environment. 

She was working in the high-tech industry when the two met and says she was impressed by his impact in the green energy field in which he already worked, while feeling that she herself was achieving little. This, she says, gave her the desire “to create something with value.”  

So in 2020, Biton created E.D.I Energy. And the initial period of fundraising was rocky, given her youth (she was 23 at the time) and her inexperience in the business world. 

Finding the money was not so straightforward, and according to Biton, her appearance – petite blonde – as well as her age were “a huge barrier” at first.  

Biton says she won the investors over with slow and steady growth, initially earning their trust with “small successes” rather than immediately asking for two million shekels (approx. $550,000) for a massive solar farm. 

And sticking to what she was certain was the right path ultimately paid off. 

“It was a lot of self-belief. I didn’t really have a lot of money or a rich banking past. It was my belief that it could happen,” she says. “I grew when they saw that I can actually repay their [loan] for the system.” 

Today E.D.I is headquartered at Karmia, a moshav in southern Israel close to the Gaza Strip, and operates in more than 100 locations in Israel. It also has a number of solar farms in the US, where it sells electricity to the local power companies.

And while E.D.I has scaled up in the past three years, the actual business remains the same: placing solar panels atop existing buildings in order to maximize the space in a country that is just 22,145 km². The United Kingdom, by comparison, is 243,610 km² while the US is a vast 9.834 million km².  

“We actually try to do as many dual solar systems as we can – on top of rooftops rather than on land,” she says. 

“Because when you take the land you cannot build any more buildings and kind of takes the edge of the dual usage. So we put them on rooftops.” 

Biton has her eye on expansion, but says lack of infrastructure in Israel is hindering E.D.I’s growth.

Other companies also rent space for solar panels, such as Teralight, which is paying for the use of land from a collective of farmers in the north, and Be Energy, which pays for the use of individual roofs from building owners. But no other Israeli company follows EDI’s rental-reduced cost plan.

Among the places that E.D.I rents roofs from is Hadassah-Neurim, a village for at-risk youths overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in central Israel. The company’s solar panels grace the roofs of the village and in return it receives discounted power.  

“We save them a lot of money,” Biton says. “We’re not only generating green electricity and providing them with this green electricity, we also reduced the amount of money that they pay.” 

Those who do buy power from E.D.I have access to a control panel that shows them exactly how much they are benefiting the environment by using renewable energy. This means E.D.I customers can see the harm they have avoided to the environment per day, in terms of the amount of coal they saved from being used for energy and the amount of CO2 that they prevented from being released into the atmosphere.

Today, the company is looking to expand its range of locations to place the solar panels, even using the spaces over the plants in vineyards and on top of greenhouses. The next stage, Biton says, is to work out how much of this space they can use without damaging the produce growing underneath. 

Beyond solar power, the company is also considering a move into hydroelectricity, although Biton tells NoCamels that the licenses for this form of energy generation have yet to be issued.

So, for now, Biton is satisfied with the company’s progression – and the positive impact that it is making on the environment today. 

“I think we have a nice business model,” she says. 

The post Startup Rents Roofs For Solar Panels, Sells Owners Cheap Power appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli company has developed genetically engineered versions of the ancient castor bean – and their higher yields and higher oil content are helping nations power their vehicles with greener fuel.

The castor bean – which despite looking like a bean is actually a seed from the Spurge family of flowering plants – has been used as a medicine for thousands of years, with evidence of ancient Egyptians even using it as a laxative.

Today it has many uses, including biodiesel, a blend of fuel usually made from vegetable oils or animal fats and regular diesel, which can help ease the strain on the environment by lowering the overall greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles.

Casterra engineers special varieties of castor beans that consistently produce higher yields and grow more densely, “meaning that from any hectare that you grow, you can squeeze in more yields, and generate more income,” CEO Eyal Ronen tells NoCamels.

The company’s modified seeds can produce castor beans within four months, compared with the unadapted version grown on farms, which Ronen says takes six to eight months. This means that farms growing Casterra’s engineered seeds can produce yields three times a year.

Its castor plants, which grow up to 1.4 meters (4.5ft) in height, produce 2,500 to 3,000 kg (over 6,500 lbs) of seeds per hectare. Other varieties on the market, says Casterra, grow up to three meters (nearly 10ft) in height, and produce 500 to 700 kg (just over 1,500 lbs) of seeds per hectare – making for a lower yield that takes up much more space.

And the company says that its seeds hold more oil, with a 50-percent content, while other varieties have a 30-40 percent content.

Ronen says it was a long process to create the cultivar. It started with its seed bank, which he explains is a library of 300 different varieties of the castor bean plant collected from over 40 countries.

“This gives us the capability to create all kinds of combinations, for example between one variety that was taken from Costa Rica and another variety that was taken from India,” he explains.

Better Beans

Creating a new variety of a plant normally takes a decade, because it needs to be bred over and over again to ensure that it exhibits the desired properties with each generation. 

Casterra was able to cut the process in half by using the technology of its parent company Evogene, an Israeli biotechnology firm that develops new products for human health and agriculture.

Its predictive biology platform sequences the genomes of plants so that it can determine its characteristics without needing to wait for the sample to reach maturity.

Beyond developing genetically engineered seeds, Casterra also sells specially developed equipment that addresses problems in the castor bean supply chain. 

The Rehovot-based firm provides its solutions to oil and gas companies that Ronen says knew little of cultivation and agriculture, which is why they have expanded to providing protocols of cultivation practices and its machines to those companies. 

It mainly sells its seeds and supplies its services to countries in Latin America, including Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, and now, several locations in Africa.

Casterra is just one example of the many companies that make up Israel’s advanced agri-tech sector. Other companies that are using their tech knowhow to increase agricultural yields include CarobWay, which uses precision technologies to enhance carob growth and fruitfulness; BetterSeeds, which modifies the DNA of cowpea to make it suitable for mechanized harvesting and large scale cultivation; and Saffron-Tech, which uses vertical-farming methods to grow saffron indoors and increase its cultivation to four harvests a year.

A Changing Market

The global castor oil market size was valued at $1.21 billion, according to the most recent statistics reported in 2021.

While India is the biggest grower of castor bean oil, it mostly produces the plant for soaps, lubricants, and coatings. 

But Brazil, which was expected to produce 43,700 metric tons of castor oil in the 2021/2022 crop year – up nearly 60 percent on the previous year (27,400 metric tons) – primarily cultivates it for biodiesel purposes. The major companies that produce biodiesel from castor oil, says Ronen, are also based in Latin America.  

“I think the fact that we are an Israeli company, and castor is not being cultivated on a commercial scale in Israel, gives us an advantage,” says Ronen. He believes that its location opens up market opportunities in different areas for Casterra, as major castor biodiesel firms are tied down to their regional markets in Latin America and cannot expand on the same scale. 

Indeed, Israel has always innovated for the global community. Casterra, which has been selling its genetically engineered castor beans to farms in South America for the last several years, has just announced that it secured two orders worth a total of $11.3 million to provide its seeds for biodiesel production in countries in Africa.

Countless other agri-tech companies expanded their innovation abroad, like Edete, which uses mechanical pollination to help Californian almond and pistachio growers; SeeTree, which helps the world’s largest orange farm in Brazil track the health and productivity of its trees using its intelligence platform; and Tevel, which has developed the world’s only flying autonomous robots that are now picking fruit in Chile.

The biodiesel market was worth an estimated $40.6 billion in 2021, and is expected to reach $52.7 billion by 2027. This corresponds with news on various countries rolling out new biodiesel regulations in their efforts to combat climate change. 

In 2018, European Union negotiators agreed to completely phase out the use of palm oil in transport fuels from 2030.

The most commonly used sources of biodiesel are soybean, palm, and rapeseed oil. But growing these crops for biodiesel and other uses has led to deforestation. Not to mention that these crops compete intensively with food production over already limited resources of land and water. 

Castor beans, on the other hand, can be cultivated on lands with poor soil quality or water supply that cannot support other crops. The plant is so resilient that it has even been found growing in landfills, on roadsides, and along railway tracks. 

In addition the new EU deal, the US Environmental Protection Agency in June adopted new mandates for biodiesel by reducing reliance on foreign sources of oil. 

“All of this will generate an immediate increase in demand for castor, because out of the different sources that exist today – like sunflower, canola and others – castor is the best crop,” concludes Ronen.

The post Israelis Engineer High-Yield Seed Oil For Better Biofuel Production appeared first on NoCamels.

While restaurant chains and cafes are doing their part to preserve our environment by using eco-friendly single-use items and packaging, often the greener alternative is less than durable.  

A startup in Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, northern Israel, says it has developed a “secret sauce” – comprising natural and synthetic materials – that makes environmentally friendly utensils last longer and offer true competition to plastic products. 

Since it began to be mass-produced in the 1960s, a total of seven billion metric tons of plastic waste have been generated on our planet. And, according to the UN Environment Programme, less than 10 percent of it has been recycled. 

A small amount of W-Cycle’s SupraPulp additive (just 3-5 percent of the final product) makes biodegradable trays capable of holding hot, wet, and greasy foods without leaking or absorbing the liquids or oils. 

The treated items can also be used to bake or heat food up to 270˚C and freeze in as low as -40˚C. 

According to W-Cycle CEO Isaac Rome, the companies that manufacture biodegradable trays are inclined to add SupraPulp to their process because doing so does not require any special machinery or any other major change to their industrial process.

The biodegradable trays are made by combining sugarcane and eucalyptus pulp as well as other organic materials that are industrial byproducts that would otherwise go to waste. 

Once the mixture has a porridge-like consistency, it is poured into container molds, and baked until dry. All that is needed to increase the trays’ resilience is a little SupraPulp that is added while the pulps are being combined.

W-Cycle, which partners with these companies and adds SupraPulp during the mixing, sells the finished product to its clients. 

The startup is already supplying the custom-made trays to airline catering companies, frozen ready-meals producers, and even consumer goods giant Unilever. 

SupraPulp has also received approval from the United States and European Union for its packaging that comes in contact with food and can be completely turned into compost. 

For now, the formula does not prevent oxidation of its contents, which causes some foods to spoil quickly (although it does have plans for an improved version that protects against oxygen and humidity).

Rome says this will not stop industry giants from jettisoning tried-and-tested plastic. 

“There’s been a push by big companies to get rid of plastic,” he tells NoCamels. 

“Global and international companies like Nestlé, Unilever, and others have committed to get rid of plastic in the next decade. They’re all looking for solutions. And as far as [SupraPulp’s] properties go, some of them are even better than plastic,” he says.  

In fact, Rome asserts, all of his clients thus far have approached W-Cycle, rather than the other way around, which he believes shows the industry’s need for a solution like his. 

Aside from deriving an income from sales of the products, W-Cycle has also secured investment from unnamed French and Israeli sources as well as the kibbutz where it is based. 

A World Of Plastic Waste

Most plastic waste is either tossed into a landfill or is incinerated, according to the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition. And even when it is recycled, its quality diminishes, so manufacturers must mix in large portions of freshly made plastic to restore some of its desirable properties before downcycling it into a lower-quality product. 

As a result, a global biodegradable plastics market has emerged that by 2021 was worth over seven billion dollars, saturated with companies that are trying to address the problem. 

Some firms, like US-based NatureWorks, create bioplastics, which are plastics that are produced from raw vegetable materials (usually sugars) with bacterial strains. 

Even though they have a smaller carbon footprint than traditional plastics made from petroleum, they can only be safely broken down in industrial composting facilities, and will not break down in a landfill. 

Rome believes that a better solution to the plastic problem is tackling the issue at the source, and creating single-use materials that can biodegrade without remaining for hundreds of years in the environment.

While other companies are also creating biodegradable, single-use utensils, Rome says that they are either not as durable, or have not found their own reliable “secret sauce.”  

“If you take those products and put them in the oven, for example, the oil or water is going to leak,” he says. 

W-Cycle was founded by Joseph Siani in 2017, who was in the packaging industry for two decades and spent years looking for ways to make packaging more environmentally friendly. 

The company is currently participating in the accelerator program run by MassChallenge, a nonprofit that accelerates startups worldwide.  

For now, they are focused on providing packaging solutions for the food industry, but have plans to expand to the cosmetics and electronics industries, both of which use significant amounts of plastic. 

Rome sees eradicating plastic as the long-term goal. 

“Recycling it is not a perfect solution. We’re looking to help the world get rid of plastic.”

The post ‘Secret Sauce’ Makes Plastic-Free Packaging A Real Alternative appeared first on NoCamels.

Dozens of huge balloons are taking to the skies over Germany. They’re not carrying passengers eager to witness stunning views, but rather fridge-like containers that suck harmful carbon emissions out of the air and freeze them. 

It may seem like a strange way of tackling the climate crisis, but Israeli startup High Hopes Labs insists that its patented method, which is currently being tested in Germany, can capture the greatest amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and at the lowest cost. 

Humanity today emits 50 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to Our World in Data at the University of Oxford. In comparison, the World Bank says, carbon dioxide emissions in 1990 reached 22.4 billion metric tons. 

Around half of that carbon is converted by our oceans and trees into life-giving oxygen. But the other half remains in the atmosphere, trapping heat emitted from the planet’s surface and over time raising global temperatures – resulting in a whole slew of negative effects, including ocean acidification and altered weather patterns. 

The more carbon emissions we produce, the more heat they trap in our atmosphere, and the more damage they can wreak on our planet’s delicate ecosystem.

‘Floating Fridges’ 

The High Hopes balloons float up to 15 km above the Earth’s surface, where temperatures range from -60 to -70 degrees Celsius (-76 to -94 degrees Fahrenheit). Wind continuously passes through the payload or “fridge” – which is roughly the size of a minibar and is open front and back. 

In the middle of the “fridge” is a coolant that brings down the temperature of the air that passes through it to -80C, the freezing point of carbon. 

This freezes the carbon in the air as it encounters the coolant, which is then automatically stored in a pressurized container inside the payload. 

When the device gauges that it has captured one metric ton of frozen carbon, it removes a stopper from the air balloon, which deflates and returns to approximately the same spot as its liftoff. 

The payload’s weight also helps bring the balloon down to Earth in the culmination of a process that takes around 24 hours in total. 

The precise location of the takeoff and landing is determined with technology developed over the last decade that has made it possible to anticipate wind forecasts at every altitude. 

A Solution A Decade In The Making

The urgency of the situation regarding carbon emissions only hit Nadav Mansdorf, co-founder and CEO of High Hopes, about a decade ago. 

“It’s frightening because even though humanity has deeply invested in everything that has to do with renewable energy to lower carbon emissions in the long run, I discovered something shocking,” Mansdorf tells NoCamels. 

“Even if 100 percent of our energy use comes from renewables, we will only be solving half of the problem. Half of our carbon emissions still come from other sources… We understood that if we won’t be able to capture carbon directly from the atmosphere, we will be in big trouble.” 

Mansdorf has spent the past 10 years searching for a solution, one that ultimately came from High Hopes co-founder and CTO Eran Oren, a graduate of the Weizmann Institute of Science in central Israel, who said that they needed to look at the issue in an entirely new way – with physics instead of biology or chemistry. 

Other carbon capture solutions do already exist, but they use expensive processes that Mansdorf says simply cannot capture enough of the carbon to justify the cost. The 18 plants that are operating worldwide all use massive machines to suck in air from the sky, which is then treated with chemicals to extract the CO2 from the air. 

High Hopes and the other 18 companies all hand the extracted carbon over to a storage partner who can either store it deep underground to prevent it escaping back into the atmosphere, or re-use it in various industrial processes. 

The 18 plants capture almost 10,000 metric tons of carbon annually, says the International Energy Agency. But Mansdorf says that the current cost of carbon capture is highly expensive, costing around $1,000 to $1,200 per metric ton and the world’s economy cannot bear this kind of expense.

According to him, it would require some $300 trillion to clean the air of the carbon not converted into oxygen, and humanity must capture 25 billion tonnes every year to prevent the climate from changing further.  

“These are the two obstacles,” Mansdorf says of the cost and scale involved. “High Hopes, for the first time ever, is a current solution that can demonstrate from every aspect – scientifically, economically, technologically – that it can capture a significant amount of carbon.” 

Their solution, which doesn’t require massive land or energy use, will cost just $55 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, instead of the standard of $1,000 to $1,200 per metric ton. 

Even as it tests in Germany, High Hopes is in the process of establishing its first ever balloon farm at an undisclosed location in the USA, which is set to be completed in the next 18 months.  

Each balloon farm will be able to handle a little more than 1,000 balloons, maybe even more, but it will start with just dozens. 

The startup was initially bootstrapped, but has raised $6.5 million since it was founded in 2020. 

And High Hopes has, well, high hopes for its technology’s impact on the climate crisis.

“We’re talking about capturing over 100 million metric tons of carbon before 2030,” Mansdorf declares. 

The post Clearing Carbon From The Air With A Fridge And A Balloon appeared first on NoCamels.

Summer is almost upon us, and with it, mass use of air conditioning that takes up around 40 percent of all electricity consumption in buildings, something that energy grids simply cannot support.

That’s why one Israeli company is using ice as a cheaper, greener method to cool office blocks at those times of the day when energy is most in demand and most expensive.

Nostromo Energy packs hundreds of water capsules into power cells, which can be installed on the roofs, in basements, or on walls of commercial and industrial buildings.

Company co-founder and CTO Yaron Ben Nun says he “understood that if solar power was going to be the big winner for clean energy, then the next big thing in its technology would be storage because at sunset, the whole system would turn off.”

The IceBrick is a modular thermal cell that utilizes water’s potential for high energy storage as it freezes from liquid into ice. Picture your standard ice tray, but on a massive scale.

The water in the IceBrick is frozen using cheap or surplus electricity from the grid at off-peak hours (like at night, when temperatures are lower) or from renewable sources such as solar and wind power.

The IceBrick’s “dedicated control software” only lets the ice within the capsules thaw during hours of peak energy use, easing the added demand that air conditioning places on electrical infrastructure and thereby lessening the need for the construction of more power plants to meet rising demand. 

The company says that the unique arrangement of the capsules, as well as the combination of coolants within them for uniform and rapid freezing, means less energy is needed to freeze the water.

The water circulating within the building cools down as it passes through the IceBrick, saving energy.

The cooling system also eliminates the need to use chillers – the massive machines that use energy from the grid to cool water and power air conditioners in commercial and industrial buildings during the hottest points of the day. 

Additionally, the energy released from the ice as it melts is used to power the air conditioning system itself – not just cool the water that it uses to chill its rooms.

“When the water freezes, it stores a tremendous amount of electricity – 80 times more than if we just changed the temperature without it freezing,” Yoram Ashery, CEO of Nostromo, tells NoCamels.

“Instead of having the chillers cool the water, we [use our system to] melt the ice, and by that we chill the water.”

A single IceBrick cell can discharge four to eight hours of cooling, and save 7 to 12 kWh (kilowatt hours) of energy every day.

Ashery says that just one installed system can save 300 tons of carbon a year alone – and the company’s overall contribution only continues to grow. 

Israel’s startup sector includes more than 100 companies specializing in energy tech and over 600 working on climate solutions.

The IceBrick systems are already in use in Israel and in the US, cooling office buildings, data centers and medical device manufacturers, the rooms of which must remain chilled to prevent the growth of bacteria.

Nostromo, which is based in Moshav Shdema near the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, will also soon be installing its systems in 120 American buildings – mostly in California – under a scheme by the US Department of Energy to support clean energy use. 

Additional systems are to be placed in Israel’s Soroka Hospital in the desert city of Be’er Sheva, and in a hotel in Los Angeles whose name Ashery cannot disclose, but says is “iconic.”

“Our focus is the commercial buildings, which have high use of air conditioning. From a market perspective, we’re talking about a quarter of a million buildings in the US,” says Ashery.

So what is a company’s incentive to use Nostromo’s system?

When companies shift their energy consumption from the peak hours to the off-peak hours, they’re switching from expensive power to cheap power.

But beyond that, Ashery believes that there are companies that truly want to make a change for the sake of the environment. 

“There are companies that want to do good, and they are investing in various sustainability initiatives because they want to do the right thing,” he says.

“And other times, it’s just good for businesses. Consumers like you and I often have a preference for brands that we know are more environmentally conscious.”

Global temperatures are on the rise, and are likely to reach new records in the next five years, according to the World Meteorological Organization. This will only result in more and more people leaving their air conditioning units on for longer and longer periods of time.

In fact, the use of energy to cool buildings has doubled since 2000, and over the next three decades, the use of air conditioning units is set to become one of the top drivers of global electricity demand. Right now, it’s at 10 percent, according to the International Energy Agency. 

By the peak hours of energy use in the afternoon (from 4PM to 9PM), energy suppliers resort to supplementing the grid with so-called peaker plants – inefficient power plants that quickly supply energy, but at a great cost to the environment… and to our wallets. 

Peaker plants typically emit far more pollution per megawatt-hour than regular power plants because their fuels are often dirtier, and because the quick ramping up and down does not allow pollution controls to effectively capture air pollutants.

Peaker plants in New York City, for example, emit twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than regular power plants, and 20 times as much nitrogen oxides, according to the nonprofit law organization Earthjustice.

They also cost more per kilowatt hour than baseload power, or the minimum amount of electric power needed to be supplied to the electrical grid at any given time. 

Nostromo, on the other hand, can control its pollutant-free system through the cloud, so that its team can communicate and interact with grid operators, and dispatch systems when the grid needs power reduction the most.

The post Giant Ice Trays Cool Buildings Using Green Energy appeared first on NoCamels.

Getting fresh coffee into our hands usually exacts a huge carbon footprint, requiring thousands of air miles and myriad packaging at every stage of the production chain. 

Coffee machines normally use beans that have already been roasted, which involves a resource-heavy heating process as well as shipping beans from one place to another over extended periods of time. 

Israeli startup ansā has developed a unique method that allows coffee drinkers to roast their own green beans at home, without plenty of wasteful, non-sustainable packaging and the pollution that comes from heating them.

The answer was “to bring the roasting process closer to the point of conception,” while using ansā’s revolutionary heat-free dielectric heating system to roast the beans without any smoke or ashy by-product. 

Dielectric heating uses an electric field to make the molecules of an object move and thereby generate heat, as opposed to applying heat from an external source.

Ayelet Dar-Wohl, director of marketing and sustainability at ansā, tells NoCamels that the company’s three founders, Yuval Weisglass and brothers Matan and Jonathan Scharf, between them have a solid blend of tech knowhow and coffee expertise, and together they came up with the solution to the problem of creating a tasty yet sustainable beverage. 

“There’s several solutions for roasting coffee on demand on the spot. But all of them are roasting coffee with the industrial way of roasting coffee; they are using roasters that roast coffee with heat and that produces smoke,” says Dar-Wohl.

“You can’t actually put it, let’s say, in your living room or your kitchen or office, and roast coffee without making a lot of noise and smoke,” she explains. 

“Because of our patent-pending technology, we are roasting coffee in a totally different way. It’s not the industrial way of roasting coffee. We are roasting coffee with innovative technology that doesn’t use any heat, or create noise or smoke,” she says. 

The Ramat Gan-based company delivers the unroasted green beans to the door, ready to be roasted in their baristā e23 machine. At the heart of it, the company says, are fresh coffee and good environmental practices. 

By roasting the beans at home, according to the makers of the new AI-operated system, consumers cut out many of the stages in the production chain from farm to cup – and get a beverage perfectly matched to their tastes. 

“It’s a problem that you’re drinking coffee that was harvested months and even sometimes years before you consume it,” Dar-Wohl says. 

“We are working on being able to roast each and every bean precisely the same. With our technology it’s much easier and much more accurate.” 

Keeping sustainability in mind, the way the beans are delivered is also important to the company, it says. ansā uses environmentally friendly packaging and, because they have not yet been roasted, the beans have a longer shelf life. 

“We are packaging the beans in carton boxes without any plastic, silicon, aluminum or any harmful material,” Dar-Wohl says. 

“It’s great and we don’t have to keep it fresh – it’s raw material that can stand out in the open for even longer than two years and nothing happens to the green beans. So this also has a huge sustainability impact.”

Similarly, ansā acquires the beans straight from the farmers themselves and stores them at its facility in Dallas, Texas, USA, before delivering them to the customer. 

This eradicates the need to send the beans to an external company for roasting and processing. 

“When you’re buying coffee, first it was planted in let’s say Costa Rica, and then the farmers picked it, processed it and sent it,” Dar-Wohl says. 

“It’s traveled from Costa Rica, most of the time in ships, most of the time to roasting plants in Europe, where they are packing it again in packages that contain plastic, aluminum etc. to keep it fresh and then send it again all over the world. Then it sits on our shelves.” 

This system benefits the farmers as well as the environment, according to ansā. 

“We do our own direct sourcing from several farms in the coffee belt [the part of the world where the plants grow most easily]. We do not deal with any middleman, so most of the money stays in the farms,” Dar-Wohl says.  

“You don’t have to ship it again; you can buy it directly from the farm as a row of green coffee beans roasted on demand on the spot.” 

But ultimately, Dar-Wohl says, ansā is fundamentally a coffee company whose technology allows even the most exacting connoisseur to produce a beverage to suit their tastes. 

“You can control the roasting profile; you can roast it to light roast, you can do a medium roast, dark roast, whatever you love,” she explains. 

“Above all, we are a coffee company [and] when you drink ansā’s coffee you can enjoy the freshest coffee ever.”  

The post Coffee Goes Green With Home-Roasted Beans appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli farmers are providing a parcel of land each for solar panels to generate renewable power for a quarter of a million people.

The country enjoys an enviable 300 days of sunshine a year, on average, yet nearly 70 percent of its electricity is produced by burning natural gas from its massive reserves in the Mediterranean Sea. 

But in northern Israel, green energy company Teralight is hoping to make a dent in that statistic.

It has just started installing the first of 300,000 solar panels, in what will be the country’s largest renewable energy project to date. 

Tens of thousands of households will benefit from the Ta’anakh project – named after the region it is taking place in – starting early next year.

The solar panels will cover 2,500 dunams, which is around the size of 617 football fields. 

For a country as geographically small and population-dense as Israel, (roughly the size of New Jersey) a project of this size is no small feat. In fact, it took seven years to get it off the ground, says Rani Lifshitz, CEO of Teralight.  

Israel’s problem with building large-scale solar farms – which is less costly than mounting solar panels on rooftops – is that the country simply does not have the land to spare, especially with its ever-growing population.

“It’s a very small country and the potential for such a large project is very limited,” Lifshitz says. 

The Negev desert, which covers more than a million dunam in the south of the country, is largely uninhabited, but much of it is reserved for the Israel Defense Forces. 

Furthermore, the delivery of green electricity in the Negev would be limited as it is far from Israel’s major population centers (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa).

“So even if you may be able to construct the project, you won’t be able to transfer the electricity,” explains Lifshitz. 

“At the end of the day, the project needs to be completed in a reasonable location that is not far away from the users.”

His solution was to use land in Israeli agricultural settlements (moshavim and kibbutzim) geographically close enough to major cities for the project to work. But that came with its own complications too.

Moshavim and kibbutzim are not very big, and so each one was only able to offer a small slice of their agricultural land for the project. 

“If we wanted to construct or develop a big project, like the Ta’anakh, whose size is around 2,500 dunams, we needed to have 10 moshavim or kibbutzim on board altogether, which was very complicated.”

Signing up so many different entities at the same time indeed proved to be a challenge, one complicated by the fact that the land is actually owned and leased out by the state.

Therefore, Teralight had to ensure that the project would abide by state’s laws on land usage, as well as Electric Corporation’s regulations, before proceeding.

In most of the world, land is privately owned, Lifshitz points out, which would have made the process a simpler one. 

“We knew from the beginning it would take a long time, but we had the patience, financial skills and resources needed to support such a project, and we knew how to find the right professionals to handle this very tough challenge,” he says.  

“One of the most important benefits of this project, besides the green energy, is the capacity we will produce – amounting to the electricity 63,000 households consume.” 

He compares the mitigating effect of the project on global warming to removing 51,000 cars from the roads or planting 110,000 new trees. 

The construction and operation of the 250 megawatt (MW) project will also provide hundreds of jobs to people in the Jezreel Valley. 

Constructing the project alone costs 480 million shekels ($131 million), which will take 10 years to pay off. After that, Lifshitz says, the solar panels will pay for themselves and more.

The post Solar Farm To Generate Power For 250,000 Israelis appeared first on NoCamels.

That the world’s bee population is in crisis is no secret. Scientists, conservationists and agriculturalists have been scrambling for a solution to a situation that could be catastrophic for humans who rely on these stripy natural pollinators and their winged cohorts to propagate much of the food that we eat. 

Israeli company Edete says it has a unique solution, giving the insects – and those who benefit from their hard work – a helping hand in the form of mechanical artificial pollination, which it says is vital if we wish to ensure food security for future generations.

“If we want our children and grandchildren to have the opportunity to have fresh fruit and vegetables, there is no other solution,” Edete CEO Eylam Ran tells No Camels. 

According to Ran, there are two key challenges facing farmers: the worldwide decline in the population of the insects that act as pollinators (the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that some 75 percent of crops rely on pollinators to a greater or lesser extent) and the need to produce more food as the global population increases. 

“We cannot produce as much harvest as we want or as much as we know that the trees have the potential to provide us,” he says. “It’s become pretty ridiculous because we are very sophisticated in the way we do agriculture: we use computers for irrigation and we use satellites to measure the heat of the soil and then put in sensors; everything is very, very modern.

“On the other hand, the last step of having a yield after working so hard the entire year – making sure that we have fruit – is something that no one had control over globally, no one was doing anything about it.”

He warns that with the number of people on the planet growing, countries must increase their production of food yet are struggling to do so because of a lack of land suitable for growing crops.

“That’s scary, because the result is that we’re getting less and less yield per acre, meaning that people are trying to get more and more acreage. So we are cutting down jungles, but we are not getting the optimum yield from what we already have,” Ran says.

“Mathematics is showing that the only way to overcome this is to produce more on the acres that we already have. Pollination is one of the major factors that no one ever took care of and was completely left to nature,” he adds, comparing the mechanical process to vital irrigation that is standard in farming today.

“It’s as if you’re waiting for the rain to irrigate your fields, your orchards; one year you have enough rain and then 10 years you don’t. You can’t imagine agriculture without irrigation.”

Furthermore, Ran says, the actual process of artificial pollination is “exactly like artificial insemination in the dairy industry,” a practice that has been in common use for decades.

He explains that artificial pollination has two elements: collecting and storing the pollen from the male part of a flower or stamen, “exactly like a sperm bank,” and then at a later date implanting it into the female part of another plant or stigma.

“We are basically creating a pollen bank, and at the right time – when it suits in an accurate and statistical way – we bring the pollen to the trees, and pollinate them accurately, minimizing those factors that are working against us when it’s left to nature to do,” he says.

The Edete process involves harvesting flowers from trees, isolating the pollen within and storing it securely and without any contamination. Edete’s machines then douse the plants in pollen at an optimal time for germination.

“We make sure that the quality of the pollen is high, it’s germinable (can reproduce) and it reaches the flowers exactly where the flowers are receptive and willing to receive it. And obviously we are doing it in a natural way – we’re not interfering with anything except replacing this vector of providing the pollen,” he insists, adding that the pollen, once collected, is left “completely pure.”

Ran says that while male and female parts of a flower would once bloom at the same time, climate change has disrupted that synchronicity, making Edete’s solution all the more vital, even if it is somewhat alien to those to whom the word agriculture immediately conjures images of more traditional farming practices.

“I know that it’s very romantic when you look at agriculture, you see the green and you see the flowers and you know it smells brilliant. But agriculture is not natural, it’s an industry and it is getting more and more aggressive,” Ran says.

He says that the use of pesticides and monoculture farming (growing just one crop in a field at one time) have been “disastrous for insects,” making natural pollination unsustainable.

“If we are working in an artificial way, and we’re trying to make nature work in an unnatural way, we should solve the problem ourselves,” he says.

Given the grave situation the Edete CEO describes, it is hardly surprising that the demand for his company’s product is already high – and in every corner of the globe. Edete’s artificial pollination process is already on the market in California, where it is used to grow almonds and pistachios.

“Almonds are completely 100 percent dependent on bees and there’s not enough bees in the entire US to serve the huge almond industry in California,” Ran says. “They are facing an acute crisis. So we are there.”

The Californian pistachio growers, however, face the problem of the male and female flower parts now developing at different times, making its natural wind germination very difficult.

“You can’t bring in more bees, you can’t do anything, because if you don’t have the male and the female together, you don’t have a ‘child’. The only way to overcome it is by artificial pollination. When you take the pollen from the males and you bring it to the females, even if [the process is] separated by a few weeks, you can be there, take the pollen and move it.”

With its success in pollinating Californian almond and pistachio flowers, Edete is now considering cautious expansion into other countries and crops, such as apples in China and rosaceae (members of the rose family such as cherries, raspberries and strawberries) that are found throughout Europe.

“We get requests from all over the world, [but] as a small start up, we have to take it one step after another.”

Before you save the world?

Ran laughs.

“Before we save the world we need to grow too.”

The post Machine Pollination Tackles Climate Change, Food Demands appeared first on NoCamels.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure – and that’s the way it is for nearly 100,000 Israelis, thanks to a new app. 

They’re getting discounts and coupons on anything from surfing and rock climbing lessons to online eco-friendly clothing and beauty stores, just by filming themselves properly disposing of litter they find outside. 

“We price trash with virtual coins, which can later buy you food, drinks, and recreational activities with local and online businesses,” says Adam Ran, CEO of CleanCoin Technologies, an app that was launched just a year ago. 

“Our municipalities aren’t able to budge people – not even a little – to be more sustainable. What we provide is the tools, information and the incentive in order to get people involved.”

Every time a user films themselves disposing of a piece of litter in a trash can or in the correct recycling bin, they earn a “clean coin”. If they collect enough trash to fill an entire bag, they’ll earn around 10 coins. 

Their filmed contributions are approved as genuine (usually within four days) by a combination of AI, fellow users and annotators from the company.

Users can then spend their accumulated coins on coupons and discounts in the app’s marketplace. They include rewards like a free night at the Abraham Hostel chain, deliveries of fresh vegetables, eco-friendly clothing and accessories, and various recreational activities from local businesses. Soon, users will also be able to donate their coins to good causes.

“Every person wants something else, so we try to appeal to everyone,” says Ran.

So how does a company like CleanCoin turn a profit if it’s effectively giving away money?

Municipalities and recycling corporations pay CleanCoin, whose users dispose of trash for free, which the company implies is cheaper than employing people to do so. “By utilizing CleanCoin’s platform, clients can optimize their waste collection and recycling efforts, leading to significant cost savings and a more sustainable operation,” says Ran.

CleanCoin also earns a percentage of each transaction made through its app. Business owners who offer the discounts to app users benefit by being able to tap into a specific segment of the population, specifically those who care about the environment and about making eco-friendly purchases and who are likely to become regular paying customers.  

This explains why just two months after being launched, CleanCoin already has 40,000 active users and now has 100,000.

I tried the app out, and filmed myself taking a couple recyclable cartons of soy milk to a nearby orange bin (which in Israel is used to recycle cartons and plastic bottles).

It was a little embarrassing at first filming myself, and CleanCoin’s app interface is a little on the clunky side, but I can definitely see myself using it again… and hopefully getting a discount or two.  

The app can increase recycling engagement among all ages, but its marketing efforts are mostly focused on children.

Earning a virtual allowance is a great incentive for them to keep throwing away trash and properly recycling containers and cartons. 

But beyond that, says Ran, kids are more likely to adopt new technologies, and they have more time on their hands than their parents. So for them, the app can have the greatest impact, and serve as an educational tool that may remain with them even after they’ve stopped using it. 

For this reason, CleanCoin is involved with Israeli youth movements, gives talks at schools, and provides educational aids to schools to convey the importance of recycling to kids.  

Ran really believes an app like this can make a difference. “When people see someone cleaning up in the street, they feel uncomfortable not helping out,” he says.

He shares an example of a day out with his family at a nature reserve in Emek Hefer, central Israel. The creek and the trail were strewn with litter, so he started cleaning it up. Within minutes, 30 people were cleaning together, and the area was soon spotless.

“Just 10 minutes before, it was filled with trash. That’s why I believe this app can have a societal effect. When you see people doing something good, it’s hard not to join in.”

Of course, there’s always the concern that users will cheat the system to reap its rewards. The app uses AI to prevent fraud by calculating whether a user found a reasonable amount of trash that is expected to be found in the area they’re operating in, how many times they reported trash sightings within a specific time frame, and how much time has passed between each video they sent in. 

The AI was trained with millions of frames from video files of people throwing out trash, and annotators within the company are also constantly verifying portions of the data to make it smarter. Ran expects the approval process to be cut down to a minute and a half by CleanCoin’s next update.

Eventually, the app will distribute coins based on the type of trash a user picks up, and the distance between the litter’s location and the nearest trash can or recycling bin, rather than rewarding users based on quantity alone. 

“For example, picking up 50 cigarette butts might sound like a small amount that you can hold in your hand, but it actually takes a lot of effort,” Ran explains. “We’re gonna price it highly because this kind of litter does a lot of damage, and can be swallowed by any fish, and travel up the food chain.”

CleanCoin will soon be launched in Niagara, Canada, which has a population of 500,000. The app’s future targets include New York and the United Kingdom. 

The post Video App Turns Trash Into Cash For 100,000 Israelis appeared first on NoCamels.

From coconut-oil cheese to powdered egg mix made of chickpea, there are plenty of animal-free alternatives out there to enjoy.

But they all face the same problem. Because they lack the natural protein content of their animal counterparts, they have to be supplemented with protein powders made from pea, soy, and other sources. 

That gives them a strange aftertaste or a weird texture, and often results in consumers turning their noses up at plant-based alternatives.

An Israeli startup has created a “ghost” protein made from microalgae that solves both these problems. It is virtually tasteless and it has no effect on the food texture.

It’s a white powder derived from chlorella, which is widely used as a health supplement but has a strong and unpleasant seaweed flavor.

Researchers at Brevel made two breakthroughs. They perfected a method of growing a high-protein version of chlorella. And they developed a secret and patented way to remove the flavor.

The microalgae protein they produce will first be used in dairy-free cheeses made by Vgarden, a developer of plant-based foods, and should hit the shelves at the end of this year.

Brevel is also building a facility in Kibbutz Yotvata, southern Israel. It will be able to produce 900,000 liters a year of the microalgae, to be processed into a powder for vegan dairy, egg, fish, and seafood products.

Chlorella, a type of freshwater algae, has many health benefits including vitamins, minerals, fats, and fiber, but plant-based food makers have so far avoided using it, because of its strong flavor.

Brevel grows it in specially-developed stainless steel fermenters, with hundreds of LED-filled brass tubes to illuminate the inside of the tank.

Microalgae like chlorella is grown in two ways, but each method has its downsides. When grown in outdoor pond systems, the microalgae is able to gain its multiple health benefits because of its exposure to the sun, but it requires a lot of space and is more costly.

And when cultivated in indoor, stainless steel fermenters, it grows faster and has higher yields, but because it has no access to the sun, it doesn’t develop its high protein content or other nutritional values.

Brevel’s process is the best of both worlds: it quickly grows its chlorella strains in indoor fermenters, and ensures it develops its many health benefits through the use of LED lights.

And by fine tuning the conditions it grows in and the nutrients they provide, it makes it easier to extract the protein and get rid of the remaining, ‘seaweed’-like flavor.

“It sounds simple: just take a fermenter and stick in some lights,” says Yonatan Golan, CEO. 

“But that’s like saying ‘just take a car that runs on diesel, stick in some rechargeable batteries, and you’ll get a Tesla’. In reality, it took us two years to do this efficiently.

Until now, microalgae has been more costly to produce than soy, peas or other types of alternative protein, but Brevel’s breakthrough changes that. 

“For the first time, we’re actually able to get to cost levels that are relevant for the food industry, and relevant for large food manufacturers that want to replace existing protein sources with a new source that is also sustainable and tasty.” 

Microalgae fermenters are huge tanks that are sealed to remain sterile and prevent the growth of bacteria and yeast, with only a handful of openings to measure parameters like oxygen levels and pressure.

In order to introduce light, the tank, which basically contains dense green water that is difficult to fully penetrate, needs hundreds of openings so it can reach every part of it  – which means there are small crevices where spores can hide.

“If we do not have such a large concentration of light elements inside, it’s basically growing in the dark,” he says.

And in the jungle of tubes and openings, it is impossible to clean it effectively without massive human intervention. Especially when some tanks can contain up to 5,000 liters.

Brevel’s patented stainless steel tank includes hundreds of brass tubes, each containing an LED, so that the whole volume is always illuminated. And it’s equipped with hardware that continuously sterilizes it, preventing the growth of bacteria. 

“We had to basically design and invent specific valves and other methods and processes that enabled this very efficient cleaning, sterilization, and sealing the internal environment from the outside.”

It’s a reliable and compact way of producing protein – as opposed to soy and pea farmers, who don’t know what yields they’ll have in the coming years due to the constantly changing climate, or the amount of protein their crops will have.

“There’s no variability between seasons, it’s a very stable and reliable production,” he says.

Golan believes that microalgae protein can completely replace the use of soy or pea protein in plant-based products. 

You won’t be seeing “chlorella milk” on your grocery store shelf any time soon, but rather, you’ll be able to turn over the bottle and see a mention of ‘microalgae’ in the ingredient list. 

“Microalgae is a major source of protein, and we expect it to be among the first if not the number one choice of protein for the food industry.”

Soy and pea protein have strong flavors. For brands that make plant-based burgers and meat, like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat, it’s not an issue, because they can mask the flavors with plenty of seasonings and masking agents. 

But in plant-based dairy products, this cannot be done. The more soy or pea protein that is added to oat milk, for example, the more dominant the bean-like flavor will be. That’s not the case with Brevel. 

“Even soy milk itself is masked with sugar and vanilla extract,” explains Golan. “It doesn’t taste like soy.”

In the future, the startup will use its microalgae to give different textures and gelation properties, mostly for seafood and fish alternatives.

“Though I am sure that for some applications, other alternative proteins will work better. Maybe fungi would work better for plant-based beef, for example.”

The post Growing “Ghost” Protein For Plant-Based Food appeared first on NoCamels.

It’s summer, and the ritual of buying a new pair of flimsy plastic flip-flops for the beach begins again. They wear out, so you trash them, and the cycle repeats year after year.

This ‘wear them and trash them’ cycle is one of the biggest contributors to plastic waste contamination in the world.

But there’s now a fashionable ‘slide’ that breaks that cycle. You wear it and plant it. Israeli startup Balena has developed what it describes as the world’s first fully compostable plastic fashion product.

When the slides reach the end of their life, they’re planted in a composter, and within six months, they decompose completely, leaving only a green legacy behind.

Conventional plastics can take hundreds of years to break down, and even then, their chemical makeup is toxic to the earth.

But Balena has developed BioCir, a pioneering plastic that maintains its shape and use like conventional plastic. 

It’s only when it’s exposed to the specific bacteria and conditions of a compost facility, that the breakdown is triggered – so ethical consumers don’t need to worry about the slides disappearing on their feet.

Balena released their first 1,000 pairs of men’s and women’s BioCir slides – with a cinnamon scent – in Tel Aviv, its hometown, together with designated take-back spots for when they wear out.

Owners return the slides to be shredded, then planted back into the ground for full biodegradation at a local industrial compost facility, instead of tossing them into the garbage to be landfilled.

“When we look at the future of sustainability, it is clear that recycling alone is not solving the problem, the direction needs to turn towards a circular economy model,” David Roubach, CEO of Balena tells NoCamels.

“The world’s addiction to fast fashion has generated an estimate of 92 million tons of textile waste each year and just 12 per cent of the material used for clothing is recycled.”

So Balena started in reverse, aiming to solve the problem of a product’s end of life, and working back from there.

“We’ve turned to the Earth’s natural cycles for answers,” says Roubach. “We need to transition from traditional mechanical recycling, where we melt the product and try to make another product, to a method called biological recycling. 

“This renewable concept draws on the example of plants and trees. Nature eventually decomposes and returns to its starting state to begin the cycle again. This phenomenon is the vision for Balena.”

They’ve achieved this ‘Benjamin Button’ effect by using a combination of naturally occurring
ingredients bonded by a plastic that they say is fully compostable.

The fully bio-circular plastic can be made conventionally (a process known as injection molding) or by using 3-D printing. The non-toxic material can also be copied and pasted on a global scale, for other companies looking to reduce their ecological footprint.

Society is shifting from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality, and opening its eyes to the
effects of fast fashion. Consumers now want to know where their products come from – and where they’ll end up.

Companies that claim to be sustainably-focused tend to be small-scale boutiques. But Balena has bigger ambitions and sees the slides as a proof of concept. From there it can expand to other products.

“Our aim goes beyond being just another niche or one-time project,” says Roubach, who majored in fashion and sustainability in Milan, Italy.

“With an affordable and scalable proof of concept, we are hoping the compostable materials that enabled the BioCir slide will eventually replace the polluting plastic in the fashion industry.

“In the beginning it was a challenge figuring out our idea, being a minority player in the high-tech world of Israeli startups,” says Roubach.

Despite the challenges, Balena was able to tap into the ‘green’ potential of the Startup Nation and develop sustainable solutions, leaving a lasting impact on the fashion industry and helping pave the way for a greener future.

“Now, climate tech and sustainable startups are gaining momentum, which means something is changing. Israel is aligning its focus in the right direction, and I am proud to be a part of that.”

The post Wear It, Plant It: World’s First Fully Compostable Footwear appeared first on NoCamels.

Startup says floating barrier is instant, easy-to-use, and effective  

Oil spills rarely grab the headlines. Deepwater Horizon was the exception. Eleven workers died when the offshore rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. It was the biggest leak in US history, polluting the water with 134 million gallons of crude oil.

But the truth is that oil spills happen every day, albeit much smaller in scale. There are as many as 60 or 70 every day around the world, and those are just the spills that are reported. The actual figure could be 10 times as many.

The problem is that it takes time to pull together a response team of trained personnel, heavy equipment, and massive ships to transport them.

And when oil spills, every hour is crucial. The longer it takes to contain, the more the oil spreads, causing extensive damage to the environment, the economy, and human health.  

Oil sticks to and separates birds’ waterproof feathers, exposing their sensitive skin to extremes in temperature. It also poisons fish and impairs their heart, lung and reproductive function, harming them as well as harming the livelihood of fishermen.

Harbo, an Israeli company, aims to be the first line of defense with a floating barrier – or boom – that can be deployed in just 15 minutes, by workers with no prior training. 

They can act immediately to contain the damage – putting the boom around it to limit the spread – rather than waiting many hours for a team of professional “oil spill responders” to arrive by ship.

Traditional containment booms are huge pieces of equipment weighing over a ton, which are transported by ship with a team of trained personnel. 

Harbo says its solution comes, literally, from thinking outside the box. It has developed an effective boom that comes in easy-to-carry cases. 

It takes just two operators, in a small lifeboat-sized vessel, to click together as many lengths of the boom as are needed to surround the spill.

The traditional booms deployed by professional teams need to be anchored so that the waves don’t capsize them.

Many are also inflatable and need a power source like a generator as well as an air compressor in order to be deployed – which all takes valuable time.

But the Harbo Boom uses metal weights to ensure the boom remains upright. The device’s patented shape makes it able to ride the waves of fast-moving water to prevent the contained oil from spreading. 

“The problem is that worldwide, we’re talking about 60-70 recorded oil spills per day,” says Boaz Richter, general manager of the company. “And there is an estimate that about 10 times as many are not reported.

“The traditional teams handling these oil spills are attacking the problem within 12 to 36 hours, depending on where it happened, and the geography of the area. But because water travels quickly and the engagement teams are really slow, you need a rapid response.

“We’re not trying to compete with the traditional solutions. Our solution is accessible, easy to use, and does not require any training, which allows for a rapid response.”

The world’s oceans are contaminated by more than 2.2 billion gallons of oil every year. Only 40 per cent, at best, can be cleaned up by mechanical means, and the negative impacts of a spill can affect wildlife thousands of miles away.

That’s why solutions that can quickly contain the oil and prevent its spread are becoming increasingly necessary.

After a boom has been deployed, the oil is either sucked up using an industrial version of a vacuum cleaner (known as a skimmer), or soaked up using super-absorbent material, such as peat moss, wood products, or clay. 

Richter shares an example of his company’s device in action. “There was an accident in the Rotterdam port, in the Netherlands. A marine vessel hit the pier and there was oil spilled everywhere.”

The 200-ton spill was the second largest oil spill in the port’s history. The Tel Aviv-based company was able to deploy its solution to contain it in under two hours, and prevent extensive environmental damage. 

The device can be pre-installed anywhere a spill can occur, like ports, and onboard large ships and oil rigs. It can also be supplied to marinas, coast guards, and coastal and environmentally sensitive areas – much like a defibrillator and a fire extinguisher can be found in any public place.

Once the oil has been removed, the boom can be disposed of. Though it can be reused, Richter advises against its decontamination, as it is hazardous, costly, and can wash oil back into the environment. 

The Harbo Boom underwent two separate weeks of successful tests at OHMSETT (The National Oil Spill Response & Renewable Energy Test Facility) in New Jersey, USA – the only facility of its kind where full-scale oil spill response equipment testing, research, and training can be conducted under controlled environmental conditions. The tests found that no oil escaped above or below the containment device. 

This year, Harbo will present a new version of its product that is 32ft (10 meters) long and can fit into a backpack. It will be as light as 14kg – just over 30 pounds. 

Harbo says it’s sold almost 2,000 units of its product in the decade since it was founded, to the US, Canada, the UK, Scandinavia, and the Far East. 

“The classic customers are those that are more likely to sustain such accidents, like refineries, oil terminals, ports, oil rigs – anything that is directly connected with the oil industry.”

The post Out Of The Box: The First Aid Kit To Treat Oil Spills appeared first on NoCamels.

Hybrid fruits are resistant to intensifying weather conditions

Plumegranates, aromacots, and blackots. These are just some of the weird and wonderful fruits being grown by Ben Dor Nurseries, a family farm that has been operating in Israel since the late Ottoman Empire.

They, like many farmers, crossbreed their fruits to develop cultivars with more desirable properties, like better taste, better yields, and a higher sugar content.

But the best part is that many of these hybrid fruits are resistant to climate change.

The Eden pear, for example, is resistant to sunburns, heat stress, and Fire Blight, a contagious disease that causes annual economic losses of over $100 million in the US alone.

The nursery has been around since the late 1800s, but has recently turned its focus to developing strange and interesting fruit that are resistant to intensifying weather conditions. 

Its cross-breeding program has been around for 40 years, but the family-run business only started to really develop it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when exports dropped off.

“We’ve been farming here for roughly 140 years,” says Ido Ben Dor, the company’s CEO. “My grandmother’s grandfather was Rothschild’s agronomist, who came to Israel to instruct and teach farmers who immigrated here from Eastern Europe.”

“The breeding program is the core of the business, which develops new varieties and new products that are special in flavor and different in characteristics.” 

It began when Marks & Spencer, a major British retailer, asked for a specific yellow plum that they were missing on their shelves, so their first breeding was to complete the supply they lacked.

Since then, Ben Dor Nurseries has cultivated a variety of interesting fruit. 

“We started with flavor, which is our advantage compared with other breeding programs,” Ben Dor tells NoCamels. “Flavor is what brings the buyer back to the supermarket to look for that specific product again.”

The nursery’s offerings include the plumegranate, which has dark red flesh, like a pomegranate – but with an antioxidant content that is three times higher. 

It also cultivates the watermelon plum, which has green skin and deep red flesh, and the Eden pear. Both unique varieties are juicier, sweeter and more crunchy compared to their conventional counterparts. 

Both have also been crossbred to be resistant to heat stress, sun burns, and low-chill areas. Such qualities are becoming crucial to grow fruits and vegetables due to climate change.

Global warming caused some NIS 300 million ($96.5 million) of damages to Israeli agriculture in the last year alone, with the hardest-hit sector being fruit, especially summer fruit like peaches, nectarines and plums.

“Some varieties are more resistant to frost than others, and some are more resistant to heat. So we need to choose the right ones for the right growing area,” says Ben Dor. 

“We breed in different harsh environments, like in Dubai and in northern Europe, to get these results, and have bred these qualities in different species.

“We have some varieties that flower in even minus five to minus seven degrees Celsius. But we also have late flowering varieties, which mean that the variety does not require a lot of chilling hours – they flower after the frost event, which is a way of overcoming the obstacle of frost in northern Europe.”

Crossbreeding fruit is a bit of a gamble. Ben Dor says 99 per cent of the fruits they yield are actually no better than the average or the best variety in the market.

But the one per cent yields fruits with characteristics that are much better than the average plum, peach, pear, or apricot on your local supermarket’s shelf.

The initial process is pretty simple. Pollen is collected from the anthers – the male part of the flower that contains pollen sacs – of one type of fruit’s flower, and is then rubbed on the stigma – the female flower that contains the ovary – of the base fruit, which is the fruit that will be altered. 

It takes an entire year to yield seeds, and several more to see results.

“To create resilience or tolerance to certain disease, stress, or climate conditions, you first need to choose the right parents. The seedlings have to be put in the harshest conditions, and then the best ones are chosen. We either bring the disease to them or plant them in very hot environments, and eliminate them at this stage. 

“In trees, it takes a lot of time, around 15 years until you get to a product. So you get the first results after maybe four or five years that you can evaluate, and then you need to wait many more years.

“And when you want to take this variety outside of a territory, let’s say send it from Israel to grow in France, then it takes another five years to grow and to bear fruit.”

Ben Dor Nurseries has around 300 hectares of land in the Hula Valley, northern Israel. It also has 50 hectares around the world where farmers grow its unique varieties under license. 

It cultivates its fruit in every continent, and in 34 countries – including the USA, Chile, South Africa, and Spain – under licensing and joint ventures with other nurseries, growers, and cooperatives.

It is currently developing new crossbreeds of fruit, which it seeks to cultivate in other countries. 

“We aim to expand the breeding program and breed new varieties that can cope with global climate change, be adaptable to various climates, resilient to frost, diseases, pests, and heat stresses.”

The post The Watermelon Plum That’s Beating Climate Change appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli startup develops a fully compostable alternative

An Israeli startup has developed a breakthrough process that literally turns food and clothes packaging into garden compost.

It breaks down into tiny parts that are eaten by bacteria and turned into regular soil. Compare that with ordinary plastic that takes 500 years to biodegrade, and even then will remain in our environment as microscopic particles forever.

“The idea of Tipa was to emulate nature,” says Daphna Nissenbaum, the company’s CEO and Co-founder.

“Nature also packs its products, like bananas, apples, and oranges, but with a compostable material. Our plastics will disintegrate and biodegrade exactly like any other organic material, and turn into solid fertilizer.”

“Plastic is piling up, even if we don’t see it. Every piece of plastic that was ever manufactured is still someplace around us. And although we think we treat plastic, it stays here.”

There are other compostable plastics out there, but many of them have a greasy feel or a milky color.

Not only that, but a recent two-year study found that 60 per cent of the plastics certified as home compostable in the UK did not fully disintegrate in home compost bins. The 1,648 participants who used the compost in their flower and vegetable gardens were inadvertently adding plastic to the soil.

Tipa’s plastics have the same elasticity, durability, and look and feel as conventional ones. The only difference is that they use a handful of additives – which the company wouldn’t share with us – to ensure that they will be fully compostable, under the right conditions.

Composting is the natural process of recycling organic matter, like leaves and food scraps, into a valuable fertilizer. If the pile is layered correctly in a home compost bin, with the right combination of organic matter, air, and water, it will heat up within three days to the ideal temperature of 141°F to 155°F, and macro- and micro-organisms will begin to break it down.

Tipa specifically focuses on creating fully compostable flexible packaging – any package which has a shape that can readily be changed when filled or during use – like films and laminates.

“The reason we decided to focus on flexible packaging is because it cannot be recycled, period,” Nissenbaum tells NoCamels. “The recycling rate is around four per cent globally. It’s also a billion dollar industry. We want to focus where there’s a real need.”

Tipa doesn’t manufacturing the raw materials. It orders them from suppliers according to specific criteria and properties to ensure they’re compostable either at home or industrially

At its lab in Hod HaSharon, central Israel, it constantly tests new raw materials (once they’re made into plastic film and laminate samples), including their elasticity, how much weight they can hold, and how resistant they are to water and oxygen. It also tests the sample laminates and films in-house, putting shreds of them into chambers to monitor their compostability. 

Guy Zylberstein, Process Engineering Manager at Tipa, says: “Everyone can buy the same grade of the same raw material. But they will never be able to put the right percentages of the raw materials themselves to create compostable films that look, act, and feel like regular plastics.”

Compostable packaging will help reduce landfill, but food, paper, yard waste, and wood still account for 51 per cent of the trash that is dumped annually.

Despite this, only 27 per cent of Americans have access to some form of composting service. The United States has limited funding for composting pick-up services (only three per cent of Americans enjoy municipally-run curbside access), and few facilities that consumers can send their compost to.

Home composting is not viable for everyone, either. It requires a lot of work, with people needing to move it around a few times a week to ensure proper air circulation, and it takes time until all the food waste is decomposed into useful compost. Plus, lots of space is required, compost gives off an unpleasant smell, and it can attract animals like rats and bugs. 

But Nissenbaum truly believes that Tipa will help the world adopt composting, even if not all countries are there right now. 

“The name of the company, Tipa, means ‘a drop’. I think every drop makes a change,” she says. “So by purchasing compostable materials, we encourage the compostable industry to grow, and encourage the compostors to accept more compostable packaging, and encourage the legislators to support the growth of solutions. 

“And we all have to work on it. We do our part, governments need to do their part, brands need to do their part. All together there’s a ground to make the needed change in how we consume plastic.”

Tipa works with a number packaging manufacturers, like Altapac, a packaging and pouch converter in Ohio, USA, because its secret process can be seamlessly integrated into their machinery.

“Because we know how to work on their machines, we bring the knowledge, and this way we turn them to be our partners instead of our competitors,” says Nissenbaum “We don’t want to compete with them. We want them to be part of our supply chain.”

Tipa also sells its plastic packaging to a number of brands, and has its products manufactured local to them. It supplies its packaging to Jane’s Dough (a frozen pizza company) and Sunrays Grapes, eye drops supplier MTHK, and clothing companies including Pangaia, British menswear L’estrange, and cycling clothing producer Isadore.

Tipa’s packaging needs to be composted, but it will biodegrade if it’s thrown into a landfill, under certain conditions. Nissenbaum says that even throwing away her packaging is better than throwing away ordinary plastic packaging, which will never fully disintegrate.

“We don’t want the package to release methane, so that’s why we want it to be in the compost system, like organic waste, and like any of the cucumbers and tomatoes that we eat,” she says.

The post The Plastic Packaging That Turns To Soil In Six Months appeared first on NoCamels.

Using marine organisms for color is safe, sustainable and doesn’t pollute

Fashion is the cornerstone of self-expression, but behind a $1.7 trillion industry lies the truly devastating impacts of chemical dyes.

They expose workers to thousands of cancer-causing chemicals. And they pollute more water than any other sector except agriculture. 

But there is an alternative: Algae, an organism that grows in the sea, lakes and rivers. The term covers a huge variety of life, from seaweed and kelp to the blue-green algae that forms a harmful scum on pond surfaces. 

Algae grows sustainably, it’s environmentally-friendly and it creates colorful dyes without the complex high-temperature processes needed to produce its petroleum-derived synthetic counterparts.

An Israeli startup called Algaeing creates secret formulations for dyeing, and also for manufacturing fibers, which are fully biodegradable and produce zero waste.

Algaeing – formerly known as Algalife – takes its name from the verb form of “algae” and says that represents its proactive stance against climate change. 

“We’ve created a patented formulation that is basically our ‘secret sauce’ to sustainably dye and manufacture fibers,” says Renana Krebs, the company’s CEO and Co-founder.

“The formulations can be customized for specific needs, and can be used with existing machinery – there is no need to change manpower or machinery. This enables a faster adoption process in the supply chain.”

Algaeing is a raw material platform – it sells its materials, either ink, dye, or fibers, in bulk, to brands and manufacturers. Its partners don’t need to change any of the processes they already use.

Its formula serves as an alternative to many – though not all – of the dyes that are used for clothing. Traditional dyes are overwhelmingly made of coal tar – the liquid that comes from heating coal in super high temperatures – as well as petroleum.  

There are as many as a million different species of algae, which can produce an array of colors. Algaeing can use its special formulation to make green inks, and blue and green dyes. It is currently developing orange, brown, and skin tone-colored dyes. 

“We’re not going to be Pantone. But we are aiming to be a very important alternative in terms of natural colors,” Krebs tells NoCamels.

And when it combines its special formulation with cellulose, or plant fibers, clothing manufacturers can actually create algae-based textiles. 

Unlike polyester, which is used to create most of our clothing (around 62 per cent) and requires the use of nearly 70 million barrels of oil, the algae grown doesn’t produce carbon dioxide emissions.

Algaeing buys its raw materials from another Israeli company, Algatech, which grows algae in seawater in indoor vertical farms powered by solar energy.

That also means that unlike cotton – which requires 10,000 liters of water to produce one kilogram of it – algae doesn’t take up agricultural land or require the use of fertilizer or pesticides, which release carbon emissions and harm biodiversity, respectively. 

“At the end of the day, our innovation and technology is replacing the massive use of toxins and chemicals across the supply chain,” she says. 

The company, which is based in Beit Yitzhak-Sha’ar Hefer, a moshav in central Israel, has already created ‘second skin’ garments – garments that are in close contact with the skin, like underwear, athleisure, and t-shirts. 

Algaeing has also entered the pharma and hygiene industry. It has partnered with Avgol, a leading producer of nonwoven materials, to create absorbent hygiene products like wipes, diapers, and women’s hygiene products.

Other companies have seen the potential of algae in textiles, too. Vollebak, a British men’s apparel brand, has created a t-shirt made of algae, and eucalyptus and beech pulp that can be buried in your garden once you no longer use it, where it will break down into ‘worm food’ in 12 weeks. And Keel Labs has created a seaweed-based yarn. 

And recently, Mounid, a Swedish-based startup, has begun developing its first algae ink by extracting and processing pigments from microalgae. It is currently under development to become market-ready in the Swedish textile industry.

But Algaeing’s solution allows for existing conventional production machinery to be used, with no need to change work processes or employ new staff – which is crucial for an industry that is hesitant to change. 

Krebs was initially a fashion designer who worked in the UK and in Germany. While working around the world, she saw what went on behind the scenes of the fashion industry. 

“I was traveling in the Far East, and saw the rivers in all the colors of the next season. This was the point where I wanted to see how we can heal the textile industry and redesign it from within,” she says. “So I literally quit my job and did a master’s in sustainable design.”

Together with her father Oded Krebs, a biologist, botanist and agronomist with more than 40 years of experience, Algaeing was founded in 2016.

“We basically started to think, why couldn’t we combine biology and design?”

“At the end of the day, our aim is to enable other brands and manufacturers to join the algae solution.”

The post Algae, The Natural Alternative To Dyeing Clothes With Chemicals appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli startup turns waste from sawmills into a super-strong material

Wood waste is literally being molded like putty to create an array of household products.

It’s a healthy alternative to MDF (medium-density fibreboards), the mixture of wood fibers, toxic resins and wax that is used to create cheap wooden products – like the cabinets and desks sold by IKEA. 

Daika Wood, the Israeli company behind the innovation, uses a special process to mix wood waste from sawmills with water and other natural ingredients like cellulose, and lignin, the material that makes wood rigid materials.

The all-natural material is already being used to create tabletops and wall coverings for office furniture company Steelcase, as well as screwdriver handles for Stanley Black & Decker, the world’s largest tool company. And the possibilities are endless. 

“This is an opportunity for companies to offer their consumers something that is natural, and looks and feels like real material,” says Dr Michael Layani, Co-founder and CEO of Daika. 

“Across the board, consumers are gravitating towards more natural products.

“We take only natural ingredients, nothing coming from the petroleum industry. Our material is like plastic – it can flow and be molded into different shapes. Once it hardens you get physical properties that can compete with existing materials in the market.

“We take wood chips that are ground into flour and use water, and other natural ingredients, and what we get is something like Play-Doh,” he tells NoCamels. “You can shape it, and then it hardens and becomes very rigid.

“With Daika, it’s the best of both worlds. You can mold it to become any shape like plastic, and the end result still has the same properties as a fully-wooden object.”

The company was founded through the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s tech transfer company Yissum, after researchers there, including PhD student Doron Kam, created 3D printer “ink” from organic wood derivatives. As it dries, it warps into a design set by the scientists in advance.

In nature, plants and some animals can alter their own shapes or textures. Even after a tree is cut down, its wood can change shape as it dries. It shrinks unevenly and warps because of variations in fiber orientation within the wood.

Scientists in recent years have begun printing flat sheets that could form themselves into 3D shapes after a change in temperature, pH or moisture content. But these self-morphing sheets were made from synthetic materials such as gels. Kam and the other researchers wanted to go back to the roots of this concept, and do it with wood.

Layani, along with co-founders Prof Shlomo Magdassi and Prof Oded Shosayov, licensed the basic formulation, and tailored it to suit mass manufacturing processes.  

Eventually, Daika wants to expand into other products like consumer electronics and toys, but in the meantime it’s found a social benefit for its technology.

In Michigan, USA, Daika has partnered with Goodwill, the nonprofit that provides job training and opportunities. Around 20 per cent of its thrift-store donations are furniture, the vast majority which aren’t sold on. Daika uses the wood to make picture frames in scheme that provides jobs for the unemployed.

Layani says there are billions of tonnes of wood waste from agricultural, municipal and industrial sources – and the only solution currently is to burn it. 

But this option won’t be around for much longer. The EU is limiting subsidies for burning wood for fuel, and under its emissions trading system companies will be fined for exceeding set limits on pollutants.

And 12 states in the US, including California and New York, also have carbon pricing schemes that may limit companies’ ability to burn wood waste. 

Wood is also becoming increasingly expensive. Prices fluctuate more than other products, typically because home repairs and remodeling are highly cyclical activities.

And it’s a scarce resource, with demand increasing faster than supply. As the world’s population grows, more people are moving into urban areas, and there is less land available for forestry.

That’s why most companies use MDF, an engineered wood products that is usually bonded with formaldehyde, which is known to aggravate allergies, asthma, and cause other respiratory illnesses. 

MDF is also not strong or durable like solid-wood furniture, stains easily, and is weakened quickly by heat, humidity, use and water exposure. It’s not water resistant, and can swell when exposed to it.

“If you look at all these problems, you don’t have a solution that is 100 per cent natural, cost competitive, and is applicable for mass manufacturing processes,” says Layani. 

“And this is exactly what we’re here to offer to mass manufacturers. They don’t need to reinvent the wheel: they can use existing machinery and processes.”

Daika is mainly focused on saving industrial wood waste from sawmills. When these facilities chop down trees to make raw blocks of wood, millions of wood chips are created that go to waste.

“There is no real solution to these huge amounts of wood waste,” says Layani. “Today, you’re drinking from a plastic bottle, and you know you can put it in a specific bin, and it has a solution to be upcycled and turned into a different product.”

Daika currently sources its wood chips from partnerships with sawmills in Sweden, Finland, and in Michigan, USA. There are tens of thousands of sawmills around the world, all producing vast quantities of wood chip.

“We’re here to tell them, ‘listen, instead of burning it, join forces with us and have a real circular solution.’”

The majority of companies trying to tackle wood waste are only able to combine plastic products with small amounts of wood waste. The other existing alternative is using other natural waste streams to create consumer products, like fungi and mycelium.

“But it’s a very slow and long-term process that requires complicated equipment to get the final product. And the end result is nowhere similar to what we do.”

“We’re not trying to completely replace plastic – it has its own benefits, such as water applications,” says Layani. “There’s room for both applications, but we’re offering another set of products that can be sustainable, can have an aesthetic appeal, and be completely upcycled.”

The post The New “Plastic” That’s Actually Made From Wood appeared first on NoCamels.

Patented process breathes new life into waste destined for landfill 

Discarded plastic is being turned into scented candles, ink, paint, and more than 1,000 other household products, thanks to an Israeli-founded startup.

Conventional methods can only recycle plastic waste a handful of times, and the vast majority – over 90 per cent of the 400 million tonnes produced every year – ends up as landfill, or is incinerated.

But Clariter, co-founded by Israeli-born Ran Sharon, uses a unique, patented method of chemical recycling. It breaks plastics down to its base chemicals to produce oils, waxes, and solvents that are used to make everyday household products.

“Clariter does what nobody else does – turns plastic into new products for the industry,” says Adi Sela Yemini, Sustainability & Business Development Manager at Clariter’s office in Kfar Saba, central Israel. “The plastic that nobody wants, that’s sent to landfills, or worse, reaches the environment and oceans, is what we like the most.”

Most other companies that chemically recycle plastic turn it into energy, fuel, or other types of plastic. Clariter turns it into higher value ingredients for candles, coatings, paints, inks, greases, polishes, and a wide array of other household products.

“We take plastic and transform it into new green sustainable petrochemical products, that are normally produced by crude oil, addressing two huge problems at once: the plastic waste epidemic and the dependency on crude oil,” Sela Yemini tells NoCamels.

Crude oil is used to make petroleum, which is essential in products like soap, detergents, plastics, and even in textile production. 

Clariter transforms plastic waste in three steps. First, it uses high temperatures to break down plastics to liquid hydrocarbons, the chemical compounds found in crude oil. 

Then it removes impurities from the liquidized raw materials. They include sulfur, chlorine, nitrogen, and any other additives used to give plastic its durable and flexible properties.

And finally, the raw materials are distilled and separated to produce high-quality solvents, oils, and waxes. 

There are thousands of different types of plastic. Clariter says it is able to process 60 to 70 per cent of them, including some which are too rigid to be melted down by conventional means.

Part of the reason over 90 per cent of all plastic is sent to landfills or is incinerated is that recycling centers simply can’t handle the volumes and different types of plastic. Plastic need to carefully separated by type, by color, and rigidity.

“If plastics of different colors are mechanically recycled together, even if they are of the same type, you’re left with a grey-black material with limited demand,” says Sela Yemini. “Therefore, separation into colors for mechanical recyclers is important.”

Mechanical recycling is also dependent on crude oil prices. If prices are low, it’s cheaper to create new plastics than it is to recycle, so waste plastic ends up as landfill. 

“It has its disadvantages. It takes time to separate, and it costs a lot of money. And after repeated recycling, the plastic loses its integrity and durability. So you can’t really recycle the same plastic more than four or five times,” says Sela Yemini.

There are, however, plastics that Clariter cannot use in its upcycling technology: PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is used for soda and water bottles, and is one of the most widely recycled plastics; PVC (polyvinyl chloride), which is mostly used for pipes, wires and cables; and PA (polyamide), which is commonly used in textiles like clothing and carpets. 

That’s why Clariter sees itself as complementary to traditional mechanical recycling, and not as a competitor to it.

Clariter collects its plastic from different waste streams, such as municipal, industrial, and construction waste. The majority of these mixed waste types have a “negative value” – a producer needs to pay to get rid of them and send them to landfills. 

Every location has a different strategy, because every country deals with waste differently. 

Before the plastic waste arrives at Clariter, it is shredded, washed and dried. “The plastic that suits us floats in water, and the plastic that doesn’t, sinks – like the PET and PA,” says Sela Yemini.  

The entire process has a high yield of 85 per cent.

“We are currently doing research and development to find out how to upcycle the waste into products as well.”

Since its inception in 2003, Clariter has mostly been researching and developing its chemical upcycling process.

In 2018, it started operating an industrial demo plant in South Africa, and plans to build commercial plants in Israel, Poland, and in the Netherlands.

The first is expected to start operating by 2026. Every plant will be able to upcycle 60,000 tonnes of plastic waste per year.

Clariter will eventually license its technology to support hundreds of plants around the world.

The post Your Next Scented Candle Could Be Made Of Recycled Plastic appeared first on NoCamels.

Alice heralds a new era of cheaper and more sustainable air travel

A startup founded in Israel has made history with the world’s first all-electric passenger aircraft flight.

It heralds a new era in air travel that is cheaper, cleaner and more sustainable.

Fossil fuels have powered every flight since Orville and Wilbur Wright first took to the skies in 1903.

The world’s aerospace giants have been racing to develop an electric airplane, in most cases by modifying existing petrol planes. 

But Eviation, founded in Kadima Zoran, central Israel, in 2015, and now based in Washington, USA, was the first to reach the aviation milestone, with an electric plane designed from scratch.

The nine-seater plane, called Alice, made a successful eight-minute flight at Moses Lake, Washington, on September 27th, reaching an altitude of 3,500ft.

“Today we embark on the next era of aviation – we have successfully electrified the skies with the unforgettable first flight of Alice,” said Eviation President and CEO Gregory Davis.

“This ground-breaking milestone will lead innovation in sustainable air travel, and shape both passenger and cargo travel in the future.”

The company hopes to launch the plane for short-hop commercial flights in the USA in 2027.

“The way our aircraft is designed will actually enable economic regional air travel,” he says.  

“At present, no one else has flown an aircraft like Alice, so we are very proudly leading the way.”

Electric flights will mean huge savings for airlines – $200 per flying hour, compared with as much as $2,000 for a fuel-powered plane.

Eviation says that figure will drop even further with future advances in its battery technology. Fuel is one of the highest costs for airlines, accounting for up to 40 per cent of their expenditure.

Cape Air, an airline that flies to 37 US cities and the Caribbean, has already ordered 75 Alice planes, and Florida-based Global Crossing Airlines has ordered 50. DHL, the global logistics company, has ordered 12 of Eviation’s eCargo variant of the plane.

The aircraft runs on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that allow it to fly for an hour, and only require 30 minutes until it is fully charged. It has a top speed of nearly 300 mph and a range of 288 miles.

The aircraft’s name is a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and the idea of ‘going through the looking glass’ – emerging in a parallel universe where things are recognizable, but different.

Co-founder Omer Bar-Yohay was listening to the song ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane while working on the project, and the name stuck. 

“We’re doing something wonderful that requires a certain focus and degree of imagination,” says Davis. 

The aircraft industry globally has been working on over 300 electric plane projects in the last six years.

In 2019, a 62-year-old seaplane retrofitted with an electric motor made a successful 15-minute test flight in Vancouver, Canada. It wasn’t considered to be the first electric commercial flight because it was a modified fuel plane.

Instead of developing a hybrid airplane or modifying an existing traditional plane, Eviation started from scratch. 

It tapped into a specific niche: a commuter-sized aircraft capable of regional travel that can seat a handful of passengers.

The prototype took off from Grant County International Airport, one of the largest airfields in the US that is regularly utilized for commercial and military test lights. 

Traditional, jet fuel-powered air travel accounts for around three per cent of worldwide carbon emissions, a figure that is increasing every year.

“According to different sources, including the International Civil Aviation Organization, global emissions from air travel are set to increase up to somewhere between 20 and 50 per cent of by 2050,” says Davis.

Apart from carbon emissions, the exhaust from aircraft engines release contrails, human-made clouds that have a daily impact on atmospheric temperatures by trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space.

“We can’t sustain that, so we have to change the way that the world’s air systems operate so that we can continue to travel without destroying the environment,” Davis tells NoCamels.

France has banned commercial air travel on any regional route that can be serviced by a high-speed train.

“Alice will of course make that possible again, with it being a zero emissions aircraft that is exempted from these types of bans,” he says.

Alice can be configured as a nine-passenger commuter aircraft, a cargo plane or an executive aircraft that will seat six passengers and a galley.

Alice will begin testing for its Federal Aviation Administration certification in 2025, which will give it authorization to be operated in flight. By 2027, Eviation expects the designs of all three aircrafts to be commercially ready.

The post Cleared For Take-Off: Israel Flies World’s First All-Electric Airplane appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli project gives them skills and resources to double their income

Mushrooms are saving women in Africa from life-or-death poverty.

Thanks to an Israeli social entrepreneur they are learning to grow them, sell them, and double their daily income.

Tzippora Nusbaum is driven by a desire to spare families from heart-wrenching choices between providing their children with food or medicine.

Her professional background is in engineering, but she took a dramatic change of direction during the Covid lockdowns.

She set up her first mushroom project remotely in northern Tanzania and aims to replicate it across Africa and beyond in a project called Entrepreneurs vs. Poverty.

Mushroom growing requires a bare minimum of equipment, resources and expertise, which is what makes it such a simple and attractive proposition as a business. And it provides nutritional food to help feed a family.

Put any kind of organic waste into buckets, add spawn – living fungal culture that’s the mushroom equivalent of seeds – leave it somewhere dark for a few weeks, then harvest the crop.

Any kind of agricultural waste will do as long as it is sterilized. Leftovers from rice, maize or banana crops are fine. Even cardboard is good.

“We work with women who have been earning less than $1.90 a day and we can bring them up incrementally to $3 to $5 a day,” Nusbaum tells NoCamels. “As they become more and more familiar with it they can grow more exotic mushrooms.”

She provides the women in a community with everything they need to start their own home-growing mushroom enterprise, then moves on to the next. Once the infrastructure is in place, the women are largely self-sufficient.

“We are starting projects in places currently suffering from extreme drought and food shortages, where families are having to choose between medicine and food,” she says.

“Generally, these are people living in life-or-death poverty in extremely rural settings. They don’t have access to very basic things like health care, clean water, or maybe food that they haven’t grown themselves.

“We empower women to fight climate change and extreme poverty by teaching them how to grow mushrooms and connecting them to the international market.

“Why women? Because if you want to really change, you need to target the mothers of the family.

“They will create educational opportunities for their children, increased health care, a decrease in maternal and infant mortality rates and more business opportunities for the family, as opposed to the individual.”

“We particularly work with women because graduation from poverty is contingent upon getting the mothers involved.

“Women in agriculture are often sold low-quality seeds and fertilizer. The men get first and the women get what’s left, if at all.

“We’re creating our own producers, of all the commodities we need, so we’re completely distancing them from this market that is so used to taking advantage of them.”

She says mushrooms are a tailor-made solution for marginalized women.

“They don’t require landownership, which is often a problem,” she says. “They don’t require mobility, you can grow mushrooms in your own home, and they’re extremely fast, they grow within six to eight weeks.

“So the turnover, the return on investment is very fast. Right now we have finished a pilot in northern Tanzania and we are working on one in East Jerusalem.

“There are other potential pilots that are being set up, one is in Israel and we are in the process of expansion throughout Central and East Africa, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, and more in Tanzania, perhaps Ghana.

“I am providing them with a training center, bringing in the experts and creating the farm that provides them with the physical materials and the expertise they need.

“We hold their hand as they open their own farms. They then come back and bring us their fresh mushrooms, which we dry and package.”

She says she’s created a model that can readily be set up wherever there’s a need and that can accommodate a near-infinite number of women participants.

“We should be hitting 100,000 within two years maximum,” she says. “That’s definitely the goal. And it’s not even my most optimistic goal. It’s my more realistic goal.

“Once we’ve secured enough buyers to handle volume and enough grants to have the inflow to set up, we will move on because it’s a one-time investment.”

The women farmers can produce 500kg (just over half a ton) of top-quality oyster mushrooms in a year from just one square meter, holding 16 buckets stacked on top of each other. Each bucket produces 6kg and there are typically six harvests a year.

“The women will either sell to a local restaurant that is very proud of the fact that they sourced their mushrooms from people earning a reasonable and a respectable living wage, or we connect them to international buyers, who are themselves manufacturers of sustainable products.”

As the project grows, she’s targeting food giants Nestle, Unilever and Mars, in the hope of securing long-term supply contracts.

Nusbaum found during extensive research that mushroom projects had worked in India, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere in Asia, but the idea hadn’t been rolled to Africa, where she is operating.

“This is completely foreign territory,” she says. “I learned about it exclusively and theoretically during the preparation. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool and I would just write to people, to anyone I thought could help.”

She feels passionately that Entrepreneurs vs. Poverty should function as a business, rather than as an NGO (non-government, non-profit organization) and that it should protect women from what she calls market brutality.

“This is a social business, it is not an NGO,” she says. “If I am selling my solution, I must be on target or nobody will buy. If my solution does not actually solve the poverty that I’m coming to solve, nobody will purchase it.

“If I sell my product or my consultancy I’m committed to my clients, to these entrepreneurs that I’m teaching. On the flip side, if I’m an NGO, I don’t have the assurance that I’m actually hitting my target.

“What makes us so different, is that we are unapologetically farm-to-fork. I refuse to let anyone else come into the picture between the farmers and Nestle other than myself.

“And that’s how you fight for sustainability. The fewer middlemen there are, the more income for the farmers themselves, without anyone else taking a cut.”

The post Women Grow Mushrooms To Beat Poverty In Africa appeared first on NoCamels.

Google buys startup that finds cleanest routes for walkers and drivers

The next time you use an app to find the quickest route, you may also be able to choose the one that is least polluted.

BreezoMeter, an Israeli startup that monitors hyperlocal air quality, has just been bought by Google, for a reported $200 million-plus, it was revealed yesterday.

The company, founded in 2014, combines data from government air monitoring stations with measurements from over 50,000 additional sources globally, including satellite, weather and traffic data.

Using AI and machine-learning algorithms it is able to track levels of pollution street-by-street – accurate down to five meters (16 feet) – and hour-by-hour.

Its new Cleanest Route feature suggests the least polluted route not only for walkers and cyclists but also for motorists, who are actually exposed to higher levels of pollution as they sit behind the wheel.

BreezoMeter ​​analyzes individual walking or driving routes and scores them from 0 to 100, based on measures of air pollution, pollen and smoke.

It allows asthmatics and others with lung diseases to find the cleanest routes to get from place to place, and avoid asthma attacks or respiratory flare-ups.

“Our mission is to improve the health and safety of millions of people by reducing their exposure to environmental hazards,” Tamir Kessel, Head of Business Development and Strategy at BreezoMeter, tells NoCamels. 

“And we do that by making highly accurate hyperlocal information about hazards such as air pollution, pollen and wildfires available.”

Google yesterday (20 September) confirmed it had acquired BreezoMeter for an undisclosed sum, saying that after many years of activity in sectors such as environmental insights, Google Earth Engine, Explorer, and the Air View project, it was “excited to continue and provide environmental insights to people, organizations, and policymakers across the world”.

Air quality, unlike weather, can vary drastically in time and space, but existing indices rely on information from a small number of government air monitoring stations, which is only updated every few hours and measures only a limited number of pollutants.

Their stations are mostly for regulatory planning and for analyzing long term trends, rather than for real-time updates.

BreezoMeter continuously checks the accuracy of its air quality calculations by comparing its outputs to the factual readings given by governmental monitoring stations. Its technology is available to brands via API (Application Programming Interface), meaning it can be embedded directly into their products. 

Its AI uses cross validation, a statistical method of evaluating and comparing learning algorithms by dividing data into two segments: one used to learn or train a model and the other used to validate the model.

“Organizations today are looking to become more climate aware and climate resilient, and to inject that climate awareness and resiliency into their products.” says Kessel. 

The real-time air quality data, which updates hourly and is available in 70 countries, has already been integrated by leading brands across healthcare, automotive and cosmetic industries. 

For example, Cowboy, a Belgium-based electric bike company, has partnered with BreezoMeter to integrate its data into its connected app.

Its electric bike riders can see cleaner routes as an alternative to the fastest route to their destination, as well as a real-time heatmap of air quality data when opening the app. 

BreezoMeter’s hyperlocal air quality data is currently also available in the Apple and Yahoo weather apps, when viewing locations in the US, UK, Germany, India, and Mexico. They include pollutant and pollen levels, and health-related recommendations for sensitive populations. 

The Haifa-based company’s geolocation data is used for other applications as well, including a L’Oréal cosmetics device that determines which environmental conditions might influence a user’s skin.

“Our data can now be integrated into any mobility or car navigation application to protect yourself and your family against the impacts of air pollution,” Kessel tells NoCamels. 

According to academic research, drivers are actually exposed to higher concentrations of pollutants inside their vehicles than those traveling by bike or on foot. 

A vehicle’s in-cabin air quality can be impacted by external factors, including pollutants in traffic like PM2.5 – particulate matter that is small enough to enter people’s respiratory systems unnoticed, posing serious short-term and long-term health risks.

BreezoMeter already works with Volvo, Nissan, and the Indian automotive company Tata Motors.

“When you’re sitting in traffic, even with the sort of filters you have in the car, the inside of the cabin is just accumulating toxins all the time,” says Kessel. 

“In the same way that navigation in the car takes you to the quickest route, you will be able to now go to the cleanest route and breathe the cleanest air.”

Some of the car makers using BreezoMeter’s APIs will soon automatically act on the air quality information they receive. When the vehicle recognizes that the driver is entering an especially polluted area, the climate control system will automatically stop bringing air in from the outside and circulate air in the cabin. 

“And so the car can be integrated with performance data in real time, warning the driver to open and close their windows. That’s just another use case of the API being used to protect and determine the cleanest and safest route.” 

BreezoMeter is currently working on generating more actionable insights from the data it processes for different areas of operation, such as real estate. 

The post Monitoring Air Pollution Street-By-Street, Hour-By-Hour appeared first on NoCamels.

$1,000 device in the backyard could help beat the fuel crisis

Households can now turn their food scraps – and toilet waste – into cooking gas.

Israeli startup HomeBiogas has developed a compact and affordable version of the industrial equipment usually operated by large companies and municipalities.

Its miniaturized anaerobic digester – which turns organic waste into gas – looks like an inflatable version of a two-person tent and costs under $1,000.

Simply toss in your food scraps (you can also have it connected to your toilet) and the bacteria will break it all down into biogas.

It’s piped to a dedicated counter top stove in your kitchen, and is enough for two hours’ cooking a day. It also creates a rich fertilizer from the organic waste that can be used for your outdoor garden.

“The enzymes eat your food waste and ‘pass gas’ like most organisms do. You’re effectively capturing the gas and using it to cook or heat water,” says Ron Gonen, board member of HomeBiogas.

He says the digester can pay for itself in a year, based on US savings on waste collection and energy bills.

Other companies have tried to develop small-scale anaerobic digesters, but none has been able to do it at the price point of HomeBiogas, says Gonen. So far over 15,000 units have been sold in 107 countries. 

“Until six months ago, Europe viewed itself as consistently having access to cheap gas because of the gas coming from Russia,” he tells NoCamels.

“Now everyone’s trying to figure out how to replace that gas. And generally, the default is, ‘we’re gonna have to build big coal or nuclear plants, or get natural gas from someplace else and refine it’. 

“These are all mega facilities that take years to build and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I think when people see the HomeBiogas system and recognize that they can start generating their own gas on-site and off of their own food and biological waste, I think it’ll be really popular.”

The US discards more food than any other country in the world – around 40 million tons every year. It makes up 30-40 per cent of the entire US food supply, and most of it ends up straight in landfills. Food is the single largest component taking up space inside US landfills, and makes up more than one fifth of all waste.

Despite these statistics, the US only has an estimated 200 facilities that accept food waste from institutions, venues, stores and restaurants, and turns them into energy.

“Every time I sit in a restaurant and see plates being taken away, I just think ‘oh my god, that’s so much’,” says Mira Marcus, public relations for HomeBiogas. “Food waste is not a problem – it’s a solution, it’s a resource. We need to start thinking about it differently.”

Other than lowering electricity bills, using food scraps and other organic waste to create gas yields many benefits.

Food decaying in landfills generates greenhouse gases (GHGs) including methane and carbon dioxide, and is over one tenth of the world’s emissions. According to the World Wildlife Federation, the production of wasted food in the US is equivalent to the GHG emissions of 37 million cars – due to the emission from waste, and the transportation of waste to landfills via diesel trucks.

HomeBiogas has projects and international collaborations with governments, aid agencies and humanitarian organizations, such as: the EU, UN, International Red Cross, The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Peres Center for Peace and Innovation, WWF and other projects with various UN committees in Liberia and Gaza. It also has distribution partnerships in several countries in Africa, including Zimbabwe, Zambia and Kenya.

And last November, HomeBiogas won a UN deal to supply its systems to refugee camps in several African countries. Large quantities of organic waste are produced at refugee camps, are expensive to dispose of, and cause sanitary and environmental issues. 

HomeBiogas has launched its first industrial systems in the communal kitchen of Kibbutz Yagur, northern Israel, as well as in a boarding school in Neurim, central Israel, where it is helping kids learn about sustainability, and in an IDF (Israel Defense Forces) army base. It is also collaborating with a high-end, luxury hotel in Israel. 

The system was also used during AMADEE-20, the most advanced simulation of a manned Mars mission ever, last October at the Ramon Crater in southern Israel. It is one of only a handful of places on Earth that resembles the conditions of Mars. During the three-week mission, the astronauts used HomeBiogas to manage their organic waste. 

HomeBiogas is currently in talks with municipalities, restaurants, convention centers, hotels, multifamily developments and hospitality industries worldwide that are looking for solutions to their organic waste.

The post Turning Your Kitchen Leftovers Into Cooking Gas appeared first on NoCamels.

Mobile unit to recycle a village’s sewage for just 15 cents a day

Mobile water treatment plants that can fit on the back of a truck are being deployed across towns and villages in India. 

The technology developed by an Israeli company will help tackle the country’s desperate sewage crisis.

India generates over 72 million liters of sewage a day, but can treat barely one-third of it. Much of it ends up, untreated, in rivers and lakes, creating a huge health hazard.

The sewage infrastructure is not properly financed or designed. One in four Indian states do not have installed sewage treatment plants (STPs). Some have the plants, but don’t operate them. 

Huliot, an Israeli manufacturer of advanced pipe systems, developed the ClearBlack STP, which fits inside a shipping container. It was launched in 20 Indian states on August 15th, Indian Independence Day.

“We wanted to present it to the market on an important date. Not only is it a holiday, it should also mark the date of India’s water independence,” Miki Kedem, CEO of Huliot, tells NoCamels. 

It’s an efficient sewage treatment solution and almost 100 per cent of the water it recycles can be reused. 

“It can be put in any site and location – just plug and play, and give it some electricity. The bad water pumps in, and the good water comes out,” says Kedem. “It does not have the constraint of brick and mortar.”

The ClearBlack supplies enough water (100,000 liters) for the daily needs of 800 people and costs no more than 12 rupees – or $0.15 – a day to operate.

It is unmanned, operates automatically and is remotely controlled and monitored by an app with minimal technician attendance. It automatically sends a notification if there are any issues.

The recycled water it produces is odorless, color-free, and disinfected, and can be reused for flushing, gardening, road washing, and car washing.

Large-scale sewage plants require vast amounts of additional space in India’s already-dense urban areas, where land is expensive. Other barriers prevent their uptake too, such as high installation, maintenance and energy costs, and the need for trained technical staff. 

“Huliot is trying to reduce water scarcity by reusing water in an affordable manner,” says Kedem. “By using treated water for all of these activities, 40 per cent of water demand can be saved.”

India is the world’s largest groundwater user – but it has almost the worst water quality in the world. Seventy per cent of the subcontinent’s water supply is contaminated, and a report published by the National Institution for Transforming India found that 200,000 people were dying every year due to inadequate access to safe water. 

The ClearBlack units can be installed in remote areas with no sewage connection, treating waste water in residential neighborhoods and company buildings without the need to install pipes to a centralized facility. 

Current sewage systems lead directly to rivers or lakes, polluting natural water sources in India at alarming rates. Huliot plans to also recycle water in polluted lakes and ponds and make the water reusable, reducing the health risks associated with environmental pollution, and money spent on environmental rehabilitation projects.

It will partner with developers and corporate clients on commercial and residential projects, saving millions of liters of water per day with their breakthrough technology. For example, it plans to collaborate with gram panchayats (village councils) to help use recycled water for irrigation in Indian villages.

“I believe that the ClearBlack will be very beneficial to Indian cities in the coming years,” says Kedem.

See also: LED It Flow: SoLED Provides Innovative Approach To Water Disinfection

The post Tech On A Truck Will Ease India’s Waste Water Crisis appeared first on NoCamels.

Startup dries sliced pumpkin, carrot and eggplant into containers for ready meals

Ugly vegetables are being saved from the dumpster – and turned into artistic packaging for ready meals.

Thin slices of zucchini, pumpkin, carrot, eggplant and other veg are carefully dried into sheets, and shaped into edible containers.

They’re then sealed with a tasty vegan meal inside – such as pasta with cherry tomatoes and mushrooms, or rice noodles with carrots and cabbage.

Customers pop the finished product in a microwave for eight minutes, then tuck into the meal – plus the packaging which would otherwise have been trashed.

“We realized that between 30 to 50 per cent of all products in the Western world are going to waste and one of the most painful reasons for that was just because of how the vegetables and fruits looked, even though they were still full of nutrition and taste,” Esti Brantz, Co-founder and and Head of Impact & Creative at the Ashdod-based startup Anina tells NoCamels.

“I remember when I was in Norway going to the back of a supermarket building to the dumpster. And when I opened one, I found it was full of treasures.

“The fruits and vegetables were all fresh and good. I once found a dumpster full of pineapples. The leaves were brown, but the rest of the pineapple was perfect. It’s crazy,” she says.

The problem of waste runs deeper than the supermarket chains. “The supermarkets are not the only ones that are throwing food away. A lot of vegetables don’t even leave the farmer’s field,” she says. As many as half of all sweet potatoes can be left to rot in the ground because they’re misshapen.”

The principle behind the food capsules is straightforward, says Brantz who buys “waste” vegetables from the farmers. “We cut them down and dry them up, without adding any additional preservatives,” she says.

“Vegetables are made of 90 per cent of water. So when we dehydrate them, we can press them into a very thin paper-like shape called laminates. And these laminates are the raw material in Anina’s manufacturing.”

The laminates are then molded into a 3D capsule that can be filled with other dried legumes, spices, grains, rice and pasta, with a shelf life of at least six months. 

Customers put the capsule into a bowl of water in the microwave and wait for the ingredients to expand and mix into a ready-to-eat meal. “This reflects today’s appreciation for healthy food even though you lack time,” says Brantz.

Finding the right combination of taste, color and texture can be quite an endeavor, she says. “We have many factors that we must be aware of, especially the size. It’s hard to calculate how to press everything into a small format such that it remains tasty and ensure there is enough for a meal when it’s ready.”

Anina currently offers a Pasta Primavera Bowl (in a tomato capsule), a Vietnamese Bowl (in a carrot capsule), and a Mediterranean Bowl (in a zucchini capsule).

“We are always thinking about the aesthetic of the outside of the capsule laminate. In fact, we believe in a culinary experience that is fun and visually impressive. For us, it’s a way to give art to food,” says Brantz. 

The company’s focus so far has been vegetables, but the aim now is to target fruit as well. “We know how to make the same laminates from fruit. The idea is to make a smaller capsule that looks like an energy bar. We already have many recipes,” says Brantz.

There are also plans to sell the laminates as they are, instead of molding them into capsule form. “You can get a whole sliced eggplant into a laminate format for instance. Instead of buying the fresh one you can store it in your closet since it’s very light and it’s very easy to transfer from place to place. And when you cook it from this flat form, it reverts back to the original slices with the original texture and taste,” she says.

Over the next five years Brantz wants the company to keep bringing new innovation to the industrial food world.

“We want to make people excited and happy about their food and give them the feeling that somebody has given a lot of thought to what they are eating. After all, we are what we eat,” she says.

The post Ugly Veg Turned Into Artistic Packaging You Can Actually Eat appeared first on NoCamels.

Startup patents breakthrough way to stay cool outside without harming the planet

Liquid nitrogen is being used to power the world’s first air conditioner that works without electricity.

There are no wires, no power supply and no greenhouse gas emissions with the revolutionary Kensho unit, which has been developed and patented in Israel.

It simply, silently and gently blows out a jet of freezing nitrogen gas at -10C (14F) that cools the surrounding area.

The first models are to be piloted later this month at six restaurants in Tel Aviv and the company behind the invention, Green Kinoko, says they’ll be ready to market the product in summer 2023.

“We have invented an outside air conditioner which doesn’t need electricity. It creates its own energy,” CEO Tal Leizer tells NoCamels. She says it’s based on textbook physics.

“Everybody is amazed about how simple it is, how this energy was right under our nose, but we just hadn’t thought how to use it. Cooling is a lot more difficult than heating, but we have a great solution. And being outside is a basic human need, so we are addressing that as well.

Liquid nitrogen is widely used as a coolant in many industries, but Leizer and her team hit on the idea of building on existing technology to develop a patented system with it to cool the outside air.

“We create the energy from the pressure that is created between liquid nitrogen and gas nitrogen,” she says.

“We use liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees. When it turns into a gas it creates a very strong pressure and we use that pressure to activate a mechanical engine.”

Nobody has used liquid nitrogen before in this way, she says. Her team had been working with cryogenic (very low temperature) liquids in an unrelated project and realized the potential value of nitrogen.

Leizer, who also founded the tech consultancy firm Practical Innovation, said she realized there was a gap in the market when she was on holiday in Rome.

“It was the first time that we felt we couldn’t sit outside in the middle of the day because it was so hot,” she says. “It was 35C.

“We looked around and everything was empty, people didn’t want to sit outside. I did some research and found out that in 2010, the average summertime temperature in Rome was 30C to 31C (87F). Ten years later it was 35C (95F).

“A lot of cafes and restaurants can’t welcome their clients in the middle of the day, because it’s too hot outside.”

Two years and several million R&D dollars later, Green Kinoko, based in Shefayim, in central Israel, has the first working protoypes of a machine that could re-write the rules of outdoor air conditioning.

“We are now calculating the carbon footprint. We are using liquid nitrogen, which is a byproduct of the oxygen manufactured for hospitals. And our device emits nitrogen, an inert gas that we are breathing,” says Leizer.

“Compare that to other air conditioners with gas that is toxic and polluting. We don’t have any polluting gases. And we don’t consume electricity. An electric air conditioner adds heat to the atmosphere. We have an alternative that doesn’t add heat to the atmosphere.

“Our technology solves many environmental challenges such as greenhouse gas emissions, electricity consumption, noise, and humidity creation.”

The cooling solution makes outdoor living a pleasant experience, and helps combat global warming. Owners will typically have to replace the nitrogen every seven to 10 days, depending how much they use it.

Electric outdoor air conditioners use a water evaporation process to generate a cold breeze. They’re power-hungry because instead of cooling a room with closed windows, they’re bringing down the temperature in the great outdoors.

“We have invented a new generation of air conditioner,” says Leizer. “The technology is unique and amazing.”

The company already has facilities to produce the machines at scale for Israel, as well as its next target market, the UAE. It is now looking for investors to take the product global.

The price to the consumer is likely to be similar to conventional, electric machines. The price for the planet will be less.

The post No Wires, No Electricity: World’s First Nitrogen-Powered Air Con appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli startup cracks the code to produce non-dairy barista-style drinks

If you want a frothier, creamier coffee, try using chickpeas.

Israeli food tech startup ChickP says it has cracked the code on a high foaming creamy milk replacer for dairy-free cappuccinos, using milk made from chickpea ingredients.

The company announced last week the introduction of protein isolates (highly concentrated and refined protein fractions). These protein isolates are extracted from the chickpea in powder form, removing bitterness and various non-nutritional elements and customized for barista-style coffee drinks. ChickP has also developed a chickpea-based creamer that contains nine essential amino acids and also happens to be nutritious and tasty.

The solution has been designed to serve those working in the dairy replacement space to create compelling milk alternatives specifically for creamy beverages like coffee, the company said.

According to The Good Food Institute, dairy-free milk represents 35 percent of plant-based food sales growth in the US market, at $2.5 billion in annual sales. Dollar sales of plant-based milk grew 20 percent in the past year, and 27 percent over the past two years. Plant-based milk is a major entry point for households trying products across plant-based categories.

“We have developed a recipe with our isolate ingredients for customers who wish to make non-dairy beverages,” ChickP CEO Liat Lachish Levy tells NoCamels, “Today, the non-dairy creamers available in the market are mainly based on soy and recently rice, almond, and oat. The latter ones have a very low percentage of protein. ChickP’s protein is very suitable for consumers that wish to have a non-allergenic and highly nutritious option since chickpeas are considered non-allergenic with a complete nutritional profile. In addition, it also provides good solubility for the low pH of coffee.”

Barista drinks can demonstrate how versatile ChickP is and how it can solve the challenges of making better and tastier plant-based products, Lachish Levy explains.

Many plant proteins on the market have bitter or off-flavors, low protein content, and grainy or chalky textures. Even with added sugar, or flavor modifiers, the results lack the appearance and characteristics of real, creamy milk, ChickP said.

“Our ChickP protein ticks all the boxes,” says Lachish Levy. “It’s packed with highly nutritious complete protein containing all nine essential amino acids. But more than that, it has a rich texture, and provides smooth, stable full foaming, with a white color, perfect for showcasing the most artful barista’s skills.”

The frothiness of chickpeas is not a brand new discovery, according to vegan media brand VegNews, which cites aquafaba, the brine leftover in a can of chickpeas that has been used as a fluffy egg white replacement for years. ChickP uses its patented technology to extract neutral-taste protein isolates in powder form, as mentioned above. The neutral flavor mitigates the need for sugar or flavor additives and enables beverage formulators to significantly shorten ingredients.

The ingredient also demonstrates excellent foaming capabilities due to its high solubility and smooth texture, the company says. The model plant-based barista milk contains 3 percent protein. Existing vegetable-origin barista products typically contain less than 1 percent protein.

The chickpea S930 G910 isolates are “the most refined form of protein” containing a high concentration of protein with the advantage of color, flavor, and functional properties, she says. This makes them “an ideal raw ingredient,” noting that the company is looking into using them for protein bars, hard cheese, yogurts, and egg replacements.

The company has many new projects worldwide, both for non-dairy applications such as cheese analogs and yogurts as well as meat/fish alternative products, egg replacer for desserts and bakeries and many more, according to Lachish Levy. “We are confident that by the beginning of 2023 we will see many new products available for the consumers on a global base,” she says.

The challenges of plant-based products

ChickP is currently developing over 20 plant-based applications with leading food and beverage companies with its pure ChickP protein, Lachish Levy tells NoCamels.

“Our customers turned to us to solve major challenges of plant-based products and we were able to provide comprehensive solutions in terms of flavor, complete nutrition profile, and functionality,” she says.  “Consumers want a holistic, better-for-you, yet full flavor experience.”

“Our technologists took full advantage of our new state-of-the-art application lab to overcome technical challenges in creating creamy, dairy-free ‘milk’ for the perfect cappuccino,” Lachish Levy says, “ChickP has overcome challenges and hurdles that many startups face, including upscaling manufacturing increase volumes significantly and meeting customer demand.”

Chickpeas are a great source of plant-based protein. A one-cup (164-gram) serving provides about 14.5 grams of protein, which is comparable to the protein content of similar foods like black beans and lentils, according to Healthline.

The post Chickpea Cappuccino: The Frothiest Milk-Free Coffee appeared first on NoCamels.

This Israeli startup finds key ingredients in nature that are also found in breast milk

The ingredients that make mother’s milk the best possible thing for a baby will now be available for grownups.

Israeli food tech startup Maolac uses an algorithm that matches the key proteins in breast milk with alternative sources found in mushrooms, algae, and plants.

Everything that baby benefits from — protection against illness, anti-inflammatory qualities, and nutrition — will be utilized in a superfood for adults, Maya Ashkenazi Otmazgin, and biomedical engineer and the CEO for Maolac, tells NoCamels.

“We created an algorithm that can actually look at all the proteins inside breast milk and mix and match the key proteins responsible for different functionalities and then find them in alternative sources in nature, like mushrooms, algae, and plants,” she says.

Maolac is also said to be the first company in the world to identify and extract functional proteins from bovine colostrum, a nutrient-rich milky fluid that comes from the udder of cows in the first four to five days after giving birth, which is 95 percent equivalent to those found in breast milk, according to the firm.

Extra milk from calves– as much as 20 liters per cow — is thrown away after getting a certain amount from each one. “If we look for it, we will see 5 billion liters of bovine colostrum that the dairy industry does not use,” Ashkenazi Otmazgin says.

“The idea of transforming the first, nutrient-rich milk of cows that have just given birth into a source for human protein is a stroke of pure genius. Billions of liters of bovine colostrum are discarded each year. Maolac takes this waste and creates a product of huge potential benefit to millions at a time when the world is desperately searching for new sustainable sources of protein. The company is a perfect example of the circular economy in action,” said Jon Medved, CEO of OurCrowd, which has invested in the company.

Nursing vision 

Otmagazin had the idea to create a superfood using nutritional ingredients found in breast milk while experiencing “the magic” of nursing her first child. She realized she wanted to harness the benefits of that breast milk for adults.

“I told myself – this is the ultimate superfood for mammals,” she says in a conversation with NoCamels during a short break between a hectic day of meetings. “There are different functionalities that breast milk can provide for a small human being and I realized we could leverage all the goodness to create something new inspired by a formulation that created the human species and actually brought us to where we are,” she says.

In 2018, Ashkenazi Otmazgin joined forces with Eli Lerner and immunity expert Dr. Ariel Orbach to form a food tech startup. The company just raised a $3.2 million seed funding round led by active crowdfunding platform OurCrowd with participation from The Kitchen FoodTech Hub founded by the Strauss Group, The Food Tech Lab, VentureIsrael, NEOME, and Mediterranean Towers Ventures.

Studies have shown that there are numerous benefits to breastfeeding a baby that both protect against illness and positively impact health and child development. According to the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, breast milk provides abundant and easily absorbed nutritional components, antioxidants, enzymes, immune properties, and live antibodies from the mother that attack germs and protect the baby from illness.

Maolac’s technology relies on a bio-convergence platform for the discovery of proteins based on machine learning and natural language processing search algorithms. The company identified more than 1,5000 known bio-active proteins in human breast milk and over 400 homolog proteins in bovine colostrum, and have since created thousands of human functional milk protein mixtures using similar ingredients found in plants and mushrooms, and other sources found in nature.

Ashkenazi Otmazgin stresses that the alternative sources must come from nature. “We don’t make them in a lab or genetically modify our mixtures.”

Maolac’s active ingredients work like breast milk to directly target specific body function, traveling through the bloodstream or gut to produce higher overall efficacy at lower dosages, a statement from Maolac said.

One of the ingredients has anti-inflammatory properties and is part of the first Maolac product line for humans. It will target athletes to reduce muscle strain and improve recovery time. The product will also target the elderly to support living and improved mobility. It will form the basis for the next generation of gut health solutions for humans and pets to help prevent severe cases of gut inflammation.

The second ingredient will be a part of products creating the next generation of probiotics, according to Otmazgin. It will contribute to a better digestive system to reduce inconvenience due to stress in the gut, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), or other conditions

Maolac will use the seed funding they just raised to build a state-of-the-art facility that will feature small-scale production capabilities. The facility will also be able to create analytics and samples for customers and clinical trials.

Ashkenazi Otmazgin tells NoCamels that the startup is in advanced discussions on joint development agreements with several leading Israeli companies in the food and supplements markets. It is also in talks with several of the world’s leading dairy protein producers and global dairy, ingredient, and supplement companies.

“We have several contracts on the table with potential global manufacturers that will produce for us. Our intention is to go global,” says Ashkenazi Otmazgin, citing both the US and Europe.

“We want to be the next generation of smart ingredient companies that create precision proteins for the food supplements and cosmetics industries with a portfolio of products with different functionalities,” says Ashkenazi Ashkenazi Otmazgin, “We want to bring active ingredients in small doses that won’t have an influence on taste, texture, or colors of existing food products, so people will love to consume those products.”

Ashkenazi Otmazgin also admits that in the future, the company will go to other markets, like the baby formula market. “Not full formula, but functional ingredients for the industry,” she adds.

For now, though, the focus is breast milk.

“There are so many companies that work in the alternative space and don’t look at breast milk — there is something quite repulsive when you talk about it. But adults can take real advantage of it,” she says. 

The post How Mother’s Milk Inspired The Newest Superfood appeared first on NoCamels.

Israel’s largest food manufacturer Tnuva – known for its traditional, fresh dairy products – has branched out into non-dairy alternatives. The Israeli food giant is set to establish an R&D center dedicated to alternative protein for the first time in Israel, through an investment of NIS 5 million ($1.47 million.)

The new center, currently in the final stages of construction near the group’s existing R&D center in Rehovot, is part of the company’s vision to continue being a significant player in the food tech space.

According to Pnina Sverdlov, manager of Tnuva’s R&D and projects division, who also manages the company’s food development processes, the center seeks to answer the demand of consumers who no longer want animal-based protein. It will be a culmination of the alternative protein and food products Israel’s largest food manufacturer is working on, all in one place, she tells NoCamels.

“Our center is dedicated to the end product. And I think that’s what makes it more unique. Because all food tech companies are usually dedicated to the ingredient. And we are taking that special ingredient and combining it into the end product,” Sverdlov says, “The food tech creates the ingredients but our job is to make sure they come out as a nice end product for the consumer.”

Founded in 1926, Tnuva has a long history in milk production and dairy products, but in recent years the company has seen more consumers shy away from animal-based protein as they’ve grown more health and environmentally conscious.

The company currently operates the Fresh.Start incubator in the northern town of Kiryat Shmona with Israeli beverage company Tempo, Israel-based crowd-funding firm OurCrowd, and French investment firm Finistere, specializing in food and agriculture. The incubator opened in 2020 and currently works with eight food tech startups. That number is expected to grow to about 40 startups in the next few years.

In January, Tnuva announced a partnership with biotech firm Pluristem Therapeutics to develop, market, and commercialize lab-grown meat by 2023. The company is based on Pluristem’s regenerative stem-cell technology and Tnuva’s marketing and production knowledge.

In February, the company announced they had launched a new venture capital fund called Tnuva NEXT, focused on investments in new food tech startups and companies. Tnuva NEXT invested $7.5 million in the cultured food company created by Pluristem and Tnuva, with a corporate value of $40 million before funding, according to a statement from Tnuva

Tnuva has also invested in Remilk, a company developing cultured milk components. In January Remilk raised $120 million in a Series B round led by Hanaco Ventures. Founded in 2019, Remilk has pioneered a scalable, yeast-based fermentation process that produces animal-free milk proteins that are indistinguishable in taste and function from cow milk proteins, but free of lactose, cholesterol, and growth hormones. Tnuva also invested in Blue Tree, a company developing technology for reducing sugar in fruit-based beverages.

The company is also part of an Israeli consortium made up of 14 food tech companies and 10 academic labs who have received a notable $18 million investment from the Israeli Innovation Authority over the course of three years to develop more efficient, cost-competitive production methods and pilot scale-up opportunities that are aligned with the cultured meat industry.

The new center in Rehovot will include a pilot plant that will produce products using raw materials developed by various alternative protein startups to create these consumer end products.

“In the last year, we began to understand that we need to extend our capabilities to be more flexible with new ingredients,” says Sverdlov, noting that Tnuva as a 100-year old manufacturer understands the consumer, the market, and what is needed in the new center to find a place for the new ingredients, which go beyond the traditional dairy products to include egg substitutes, cultivated meat, fermented products, and so on.

The center will test and evaluate these alternative proteins and raw materials in various products with leading partners in food tech, startups and top technology companies, Sverdlov adds, noting that extended capabilities also include special equipment that will allow the company to simulate the same processes that occur in their factories and production lines in order to manufacture the products on a smaller scale.

Sverdlov says the expanded R&D center is part of a “new approach” in the last year to working with food tech startups and companies “because we understand food tech is different than Tnuva working with the big suppliers.” Part of this flexible approach includes a unit that works as a liaison to bridge the gap between the startups and corporate body of Tnuva.

The center itself “will be always on on the move,” says Sverdlov, “The fun thing is that we’re building a playground where we can play. So if I would like to add another machine, if I want to have a new process in line, I can do that. So [we’re building] a playground where we can play and tweak because we don’t know yet what the food tech companies will bring us so we need to be prepared for different scenarios, different processes, different products, and this is what makes it so unique, and exciting.”

“With dozens of product launches a year, we have the most advanced infrastructures, capabilities, and knowledge in all categories to move Tnuva and its partners forward to the technological forefront in the alternative protein field,” she said in a statement, “Our expertise are in developing large scale production processes and reaching relatively fast a final product, unique production facilities and our profound understanding of marketing.”

The post Tnuva To Launch R&D Center Dedicated To Alternative Protein appeared first on NoCamels.

Several Israeli companies are employing innovative strategies to tackle global drought – an urgent crisis being highlighted by the United Nations’ upcoming World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on June 17.

Desertification, or land degradation in arid areas, and drought, a deficiency of rain, are universal crises. They extend both to developing countries and to nations worldwide. The United Nations reports that no country is immune from these global phenomena. Forecasts from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification and Drought estimate that droughts may affect over three-quarters of the global population by 2050. UNICEF estimates that one in four children will live in areas with extreme water shortages by 2040.

This year, the United Nations (UN) set a fitting theme for the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought: “Rising up from drought together.” With drought on the rise and desertification posing a threat to the productivity of land, the UN aims to bring awareness to these threats. 

The people of Israel, a country dominated by desert, and facing water shortages due to drought and overconsumption throughout its history, have first hand experience with the challenges of desertification and lack of water. They have become leaders in agriculture and agritech for this very reason.

“The vast majority of the land of Israel on one end is the Negev [desert.] Due to lack of water, growing areas have become limited. And this is why it is so important to develop new techniques to enable growing, to increase a growing area of crops,” says Orna Livneh, a member of the Israel Innovation Authority’s (IIA) climate team, tells NoCamels.

“Early on since the inception of the country, we understood that we have to use technology in order to fully use the resources available,” adds Hagit Lidor, IIA international marketing manager.

Ahead of World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, NoCamels spotlights six Israeli companies working to counter these challenges.

Watergen

Israeli company Watergen is revolutionizing the collection of safe drinking water by converting humidity in the air into fresh drinking water. Employing the powers of the atmosphere, an unlimited and energy-efficient resource, the company has created water-from-air solutions to bring clean water to people around the globe. 

The company’s mission is aptly fitting for the UN’s World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, as they work to combat the crisis of drinking water scarcity around the world with their innovative method of taking water from air.

Founded in 2009 by Arye Kohavi and Avi Peretz, has become a global leader in the production and distribution of water-from-air solutions. Using their patented “GENius” technology, Watergen develops water generators that use condensation to extract water from the air. Their generations are cost-efficient and scalable, coming in a range of sizes to adapt to cities, villages, community centers, hospitals, schools, and homes alike. The company is owned by Michael Mirilashvili, a Russian-Israeli businessman and philanthropist, who is the current CEO and president of Watergen.

“We believe that access to clean drinking water is a basic human right, regardless of geographical location, skin color, or religion, and we are on a mission to bring our technology to every corner of the world to solve this dangerous problem,” Watergen CEO Michael Rutman tells NoCamels in an email.

Netafim

A pioneer and leader in the field of precision irrigation, Israel’s Netafim works to promote tailor-made irrigation solutions to save water around the globe. The company offers a unique sustainable agricultural approach that allows nutrient and water applications at the right time and place to optimize growing conditions. 

“Our solution for more than 55 years is inherently solving the problem of water use efficiency. And the key word here is efficiency,” Netafim, head of agronomy Ram Lisaey tells NoCamels, noting that water is a resource that is really lacking in many parts of the world. “The founders of our company found a solution to use almost 50 percent less water while irrigating the same amount of land or getting more yields.”

The company was founded in 1964 in the arid Negev desert in Israel. The founders understood the nature of extreme agricultural conditions and aimed to develop ways to efficiently irrigate crops and maximize plant yield. 58 years later, the company has expanded dramatically – moving beyond Israel to farms worldwide – to bring the environmentally-conscious benefits of precision irrigation to over 110 countries and over 2 million farmers. 

“We can speak about water scarcity, about soil erosion, and of course drought. Food scarcity is, of course, below those in the chain because all of these things create problems of food security. Companies like us that are very much connected to the backbones of farmers and food, agriculture, and good production are trying to supply the best solutions to mitigate these issues,” Lisaey says. 

“These are not fake threats. They are real and they are big,” he says of the growing threats of desertification and drought. Precision irrigation ensures that more growth does not require more time, labor, fuel, or materials.

SeeTree

SeeTree, an Israeli company in Netafim’s investment portfolio, has developed an intelligence platform for trees, providing per-tree intelligence to growers who want to track the health and productivity of their trees. Using drones, satellites, digital sensors, artificial intelligence, weather information, and other data, SeeTree’s platform partners with farms to scan and analyze hundreds of millions of trees. SeeTree’s mission to efficiently grow trees is more relevant than ever, as protecting and restoring forests is essential to stopping desertification and drought.

“We need to get those trees back. It’s due to deforestation and urban trends. We can return the green to the planet, replant, and manage these plantations and these new forests – we just have to focus. I think that is important. It will help us with climate change and in getting the planet back to where it should be,” Israel Talpaz, CEO of SeeTree, tells NoCamels. Talpaz founded the company in 2017 with Barak Hachamov and Guy Morgenstern.

The company offers an innovative way to manage trees, Talpaz says. It’s one that places a premium on data-driven technology, irrigation optimization, and agronomist advice. Individual trees require unique levels of water and chemicals – scanning and monitoring each tree allows for efficient and enhanced growth while minimizing waste of materials.  

“This enables us to do the analysis from the tree level to many millions of trees worldwide,” Talpaz says, “All of this technology is going into really doing more with less – especially on water and optimizing irrigation.”

Trees are a critical part of the environment, yet the global tree population has been on a sharp decline. The global tree population is roughly half of what it was in the pre-civilization era, Talpaz explains. Amidst threats posed by desertification and drought, SeeTree believes it is imperative to bring trees back. With footprints around the globe – from Tel Aviv to California to the world’s largest orange farm in Brazil – SeeTree is tackling climate crises head on. 

Hilico

Companies like Hilico are aware that now – more than ever – it is imperative to conserve water. They also understand the consequences of drought and desertification. That is why they created the world’s first portable rainwater collector. Their patented design, modeled after the structure of rare leaves in the Amazon jungle, allows users to be self-sufficient and environmentally conscious from home.

The company looks to rain, a huge and sustainable water source, to address the global water crisis. By bringing a simple and easy-to-use 2lb rainwater collector to consumers’ houses, the company hopes to help the over 738 million people without access to clean water. The company’s founders, Eyal Yassky and Moshe Beililty, also zero in on off-grid communities, helping them find solutions for distribution.

“The philosophy behind it is that water equals freedom, that’s what it’s all about. If you have access to clean water you’re free to go to school, to go to work, to be safe,” Yassky told NoCamels in April.

SupPlant

Israeli firm SupPlant is focused on digitally informing irrigation systems worldwide. Its system combines plant sensing, artificial intelligence, and data accumulated over 1,500 growing seasons to provide farmers with personalized irrigation recommendations amidst global water crises. 

SupPlant offers the largest plant database in the world, company CMO Lior Naaman tells NoCamels. By placing AI-powered sensors at five plant locations – on the fruit, the leaf, and the stem, and in deep and shallow soil – the company aims to maximize water use efficiency. 

“We were able to save close to 50 percent in irrigation both in Israel and in other countries in the region. We now have big projects involving dates and palm dates. Because they consume such large amounts of water in places where water is in great scarcity, this is a very big achievement,” Naaman explains.

The company’s tagline – helping farmers “speak better plant” – epitomizes its commitment to holistic analysis of plant growth and efforts to combat agricultural challenges like drought.

Through growth modeling, agronomic defiance, irrigation regimes, and growth modeling, the company’s digital systems allow growers to handle extreme weather events and climate conditions in an ever-changing global environment. 

In its latest development, SupPlant crafted a fully sensor-free Application Programming Interface platform to target 450 smallholder farmers around the world. Placing a focus on areas like India and sub-Saharan Africa, SupPlant aims to bring advanced technologies to farmers across the socioeconomic and geographic spectrum.

Phytech

With desertification on the rise, there is a pressing need to maximize the land we do have. Companies like Israel’s Phytech are aiming to do just that by creating a decision support system designed to help growers manage and optimize agricultural production. Employing an IoT and plant-AI platform that includes a series of unique sensors on on plants, fruits, and irrigation systems, Phytech addresses challenges like drought, by collecting real-time data to provide better and higher yields. 

The company, founded in 2011 has built a support system with three main components: direct plant sensing, data analytics, and plant status and recommendations. By placing sensors on a range of select plants, Phytech’s direct plant sensing allows for continuous monitoring of microvariations in stem diameter. The company also engages in data analytics, applying patented algorithms to transform raw data into crop-specific plant status. Phytech’s plant intelligence and predictive analytics provide meaningful alerts and recommendations for farmers and offers a color-coded plant status indicator. The company’s experts then determine plant yield and provide irrigation scheduling recommendations.

Phytech also aims to save water and other critical resources in the farming process by giving farmers enhanced visibility and accurate readings on plant growth and irrigation pressure through a fully-automated system.

The post 6 Israeli Companies Helping The World Combat Desertification and Drought appeared first on NoCamels.

Turning on a faucet to get a clean stream of freshwater is just not the reality for most of the world. At least two billion people worldwide use a drinking water source contaminated with feces, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

That’s why Professor Hadas Mamane and PHD candidate Dana Pousty, of Tel Aviv University, have come together to found SoLED, a UV LED-based water disinfection device designed to bring purified water to infrastructure-limited areas using a patented technology developed after years of research and testing.

SoLED is a small and portable device powered by the sun, and designed for rural areas with little to no electricity. It can be connected to any pipeline, filtration system, or water source. The water streams through the device and is purified by a UV light.

“LEDs are light emitting diodes. They are the small diodes that you have in traffic lights and in electrical appliances, like small dots of light. Some know that LEDs come in traffic lights in green, red — but what many are not aware is that they also come in the UV (ultraviolet) range,” Prof. Mamane, head of the Environmental Engineering Program and the Water-Energy (WE) Laboratory at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Tel Aviv University, tells NoCamels.

According to Mamane, what we see with our eyes is within the visible spectrum and below that is the ultraviolet spectrum. Our eyes cannot perceive UV light, but it’s what gets absorbed in the genetic material of any cell and makes a change, which does not allow replication.

“If a microbe bacteria absorbs UV light, it will make a change in DNA,” Mamane adds, “And that microbe will not be able to produce offspring, or the next generation of microbes and therefore, it does not result in disease because disease means the microbe is entering our body. UV works as a physical technology where light shines on water and kills whatever is in it. Of course, we don’t want to be exposed to it. So we created a special reactor design, where the water streams through, absorbs the UV radiation and the microbes and viruses are killed.”

The device features an efficient UV-LED reactor with a combination of frequencies based on maximum disinfection at low cost in a solar powered or off grid system. The reactor can be integrated into existing water filtration systems or function as a standalone product integrated into any pipe.

On June 14, SoLED was inaugurated into The Asper Fund for Bringing Clean Water To The World, a new fund spearheaded by the Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University. Last year, the company was a recipient of the IUVA 2021 RadLaunch Award, honoring tech developers working on materials, optics, design, and more. The company, which aims to be a non-profit organization, has also received research funds from the Israel Innovation Authority, the Israeli government’s support arm.

Challenge and opportunities

Prof. Mamane and Pousty have spent the last five years researching and testing UV LED disinfection methods at Mamane’s TAU lab and in the field. To conduct this research and develop technologies that could fit areas more complex for the operation and treatment of water, they have traveled to India, Tanzania, Africa, Morocco, and Mexico.

Mamane, who has a self-proclaimed “passion” to work on environmental issues, says one of the things that most interested her was how to provide safe water in low and middle income settings, especially in rural areas.

“That’s kind of the incentive for SoLED,” she tells NoCamels, noting that in her research with the water lab, she discovered that while many may treat water at the household level, it can still have biological contaminants (bacteria, viruses, dust, pollen, animal dander, to name a few.)

“Other people may feel good about the water they’re drinking, but we found in various locations that up to 30 percent of the water stored in a household setting in a rural area may be contaminated with E. coli,” she explain, “If you know about the statistics – that one child every minute due to biological contamination of water – then the magnitude of getting diarrhea out of contaminated water is huge,” she explains.

The challenges of delivering safe drinking water to rural areas include lack of infrastructure, lack of resources to support water treatment (little or no electricity or inadequate piping systems), and relying on the local population for water system maintenance, who are unskilled or unequipped to do so.

Traditional methods of chlorination may also not be enough to eliminate the problem of viruses “and there might be complexities in bringing chlorine because it may come from far away, so the supply chain may be problematic,” Mamane tells NoCamels. “Or if they don’t have water in a pipeline, then there’s no water pressure. So it’s difficult to pass water through a filter when when there’s no pressure. These kinds of challenges make us think how we can develop technologies that fit those areas.”

But, she says, people are skeptical to work with communities where the client does not pay for the product and “that needs to change.”

“It’s very important for us to work for the people we want to serve. We’re not interested in developed countries, we’re interested in working with developing communities. So it’s very important and critical for us to work with the people we want to serve and also those who have the same vision. We’ve been told many times that it’s not possible to develop an economic model that will work in these communities. I disagree with that.”

“We believe that everything is possible, we just need to put our mind to it. We need to make it a reality,” she adds.

The post LED It Flow: SoLED Provides Innovative Approach To Water Disinfection appeared first on NoCamels.

Israel’s 4th Vegan Fest, said to be the world’s largest vegan festival, welcomed over 100,000 attendees to Tel Aviv this week for three days of vegan cuisine and innovation.

The event — held at the Sarona complex in the city that has been called the “vegan capital of the world” — is taking place for the first time since 2019.

Organized by Vegan Friendly, the Israeli organization that works to promote veganism and animals right founded in 2012, Vegan Fest featured 100 Israeli vegan food stalls representing local vegan restaurants and businesses. The event, which was free to the public, also had cooking classes, holistic activities, lectures, live music, and workshops.

Festival attendees and industry professionals came together at the festival’s FoodTech area to discuss the latest innovations in vegan food technologies. The FoodTech area highlighted Israel’s strong food tech industry, with local companies representing tech ranging from 3D-printed steaks to milk made from cells to meat alternatives grown from mushrooms.

“Israel is considered the most vegan country in the world,” Vegan Friendly founder and CEO Omri Paz tells NoCamels. He adds that the Israel is considered “a hub for vegan food tech companies” and that it is the country “with the biggest amount of vegan food companies and investments.”

In the “Leading Women in FoodTech” panel on Tuesday, Dr. Hila Elimelech, co-founder and head of R&D at Israeli plant-based fish startup Plantish, told the crowd that 10 percent of Israel’s population is vegan.

Veganism is on the rise – in Israel and around the world – as people look for healthier and environmentally conscious ways to consume food. According to animal welfare organization Animal Matters, around 70 billion farm animals are reared each year for food – a rate that is unsustainable for the planet. The global vegan market is growing exponentially, with the plant-based market to reach $16.7 billion by 2026, according to Statista, a German company specializing in market and consumer data. Being vegan is no longer a niche trait but a lifestyle choice many choose to adopt.

“This is not a trend anymore, this is really becoming who we are. We are going to be different consumers. I’m not saying everyone in the future will be vegan or vegetarian. What I am saying is that the future of food will look different and will offer different people different choices of healthy and plant-based products,” InnovoPro CEO Taly Nechushtan tells NoCamels. Nechustan appeared with Dr. Elimelech and others in the “Leading Women in FoodTech” panel.

Vegan Fest has grown significantly since its first gathering in 2013, which welcomed around 5,000 attendees. This year’s event – in collaboration with the Tel Aviv Municipality – hosted several top Israeli innovators in the realm of vegan food tech. In a series of panels – including ones titled “Failures and Successes – The Challenges in the World of Entrepreneurship” and “The Future of Food” – the festival aimed to spotlight the work of Israeli companies crafting more sustainable meat and protein alternatives.

“We really believe that the vegan food tech companies have a crucial role in the vegan revolution. So, we want to promote that as much as possible because we are big believers in the technology,” Paz adds.

In light of the festival, NoCamels spotlights 5 Israeli companies participating in Vegan Fest that are transforming the world of food tech through innovative vegan products. 

Plantish 

At a time in which the unsustainable demand for seafood is at an all-time high, vegan food tech company Plantish is reinventing the way that consumers eat fish. Working to create fish and seafood analogs derived from plants, Plantish is providing the complete experience of fish dishes for those seeking to minimize their environmental impact. Their first product, a whole-cut vegan salmon fillet, was launched in January. The innovative ‘fish’ product places a premium on a normal – and delicious – salmon experience without the negative toll on the ocean.

“We are making cultured meat, we are making texture and flavor which look like, smell like, and feel like fish without hurting a single animal. This is something which is super exciting every day,” says Dr. Elimelech at the “Leading Women in FoodTech” panel Tuesday. 

Founded by the team of Dr. Elimelich, Dr. Ofek Ron, Dr. Ron Sicsic, and Dr. Arial Szklanny, the Plantish company is working to lessen human impact on the oceans – especially during a period in which ocean acidification is on an exponential rise. 

Using the festival as a platform for vegan food tech innovation and collaboration, Dr. Elimelech says she and the Plantish team are hoping to continue to change the way that all people consume fish. 

The company will ride on the growth of the vegan seafood industry and aims to launch its product in restaurants throughout Israel by 2024. 

InnovoPro

Founded by Dr. Ascher Shmulewitz in 2013, InnovoPro aims to launch the “chickpea revolution” through innovative chickpea-based protein products that are sold to food production companies worldwide. 

With a research and development team devoted to extracting protein out of chickpeas – a protein known in the vegan community as a super-food legume – InnovoPro is committed to offering companies ingredients for clean-label vegan products. Their chickpea protein products are neutral in taste and texture with strong emulsification properties so they can be added to a wide range of food products. Currently, the team is focusing on three pillars: the company’s platform, global reach, and a sustainable supply chain. 

“We believe that the more people will be involved in reducing our impact, we can do a good service for the next generation,” InnovoPro CEO Taly Nechushtan tells NoCamels. 

More than providing healthy chickpea-based protein ingredients, InnovoPro is looking to minimize the human footprint on the planet. Their sustainability efforts, coupled with their innovative approach to protein harvesting, make InnovoPro a game-changer in the realm of vegan food tech. 

InnovoPro is looking to add new products to their chickpea platform, including a texturized protein for meat-analog formulators and an egg-white replacement for bakers. It is only through high-tech innovation that the use of vegan ingredients will continue to rise, Nechushtan explains. 

“But how can you change current food formulations and preparation methods without new technologies and new ingredients? It’s like the chicken and the egg. You must use new ingredients, new food tech solutions, new technologies in order to improve the category of food,” Nechushtan adds.

Kinoko Tech

Israeli food tech company Kinoko Tech is working to produce the next generation of protein-rich food through fungi and fermentation technologies. At Hebrew University, the Kinoko team discovered a way to grow mushrooms into meat alternatives. Their natural fermentation process produces a product that has a meat-like taste and texture with high nutritional value. 

The company was founded in 2019 by three women: Dr. Jasmin Ravid, Dr. Daria Feldman, and Hadar Shohat. The women’s joint background in nutritional sciences, microbiology, and food technology has led Kinoko to be a game-changer in the vegan startup world. 

Their products – more than provide consumers with tasty protein alternatives – are both plant- and climate-friendly. The company aims to take strides in sustainable foods to minimize environmental impact and the burden of the modern inefficient food system.  

“I see huge challenges ahead of us with the huge system, but I am very excited about the amount of people and talent and money that is now going into finding a solution for this problem. We are not looking away anymore, we are looking straight into the problems and trying to solve them. And that excites me,” said Kinoko co-founder Jasmin Ravid in a Vegan Fest panel. 

“We at Kinoko believe that the challenges facing our food system are so great that we must unite and work together to solve them,” she tells NoCamels after the event. “The Vegan Festival was an opportunity to meet mission aligned people and find new ways to work together, and also demonstrate to the wide population how amazing and tasty vegan food can be.”

Remilk

Remilk is working to create real dairy without the need for cows through microbial fermentation. Their product invites consumers to rethink their notion of dairy by creating identical milk products without a negative environmental impact. 

Remilk’s innovation stems from milk proteins, which they copy and insert into yeast. The result? Real milk proteins that, when combined with vitamins, minerals, and non-animal fat and sugar, develop into authentic dairy products. 

The company is not only providing an environmentally-conscious alternative to cow-based dairy, but it is also creating a healthier product for consumers. With milk products deriving from fermentation and not cows, Remilk provides consumers with a cholesterol-, lactose-, hormone-, and antibiotic-free product – all while being 100% cruelty-free. 

The company, founded in 2019 by Aviv Wolff and Ori Cohavi, raised $120 million this year to further its real dairy protein production on a larger scale. Planning to launch the world’s largest full-scale precision fermentation facility in Denmark, Remilk will continue to innovate and produce real dairy in labs, not farms.   

The company was featured in “How to join the food tech industry?” and “The Future of Food” panels in the food tech area at Vegan Fest this week.

MeaTech

MeaTech, an international deep tech food company working in the field of cultured meat, was a Vegan Fest sponsor and participant. The company’s CTO, Dan Kozlovski, was a featured panelist on “The Future of Food” panel on Tuesday, while Business Development Manager Yair Ayalon gave a lecture on Wednesday and Biologist Dana Hillel gave a lecture on MeaTech’s cultured meat development process on Thursday.

In 2019, Yaron Kaiser and Arik Kaufman co-founded MeaTech to bring sustainably-sourced and authentic meat products to the vegan food industry. Their team now works with two primary technologies: cell-based processes and cultured steak products. In their cell-based vision, MeaTech develops cell lines and works with stem cells to form ground meat alternatives. To create cultured steaks, MeaTech uses innovative 3D printing technologies and incubation.

The company aims to create high-quality real meat products that are both safe and slaughter-free through high-technology science. They aimed to showcase their products and partake in the vegan food innovation scene at the recent Vegan Fest. 

“Vegan Fest is a unique opportunity for MeaTech and other Israeli food-tech and alternative protein startups to engage the vegan community with a shared vision of transforming food sourcing and systems to address issues such as animal welfare, the restoration of ecosystems, and global food security,” said Arik Kaufman, MeaTech’s CEO said in a statement ahead of the event. 

The post These 5 Startups At Israel’s Vegan Fest Lead In Food Tech Innovation appeared first on NoCamels.

Israel’s Raphael Mechoulam, the “father of cannabis research” and a professor of medicinal chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, became the first scientist to discover tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the marijuana plant’s principal component that causes psychoactive effects, in 1964. Later, he was the first to isolate and synthesize the active psychoactive ingredients in the marijuana plant — including THC and other cannabinoids. These discoveries are the foundation of medical cannabis research as we know it today.

Following in his footsteps with “breakthrough” cannabis research, a new crop of Hebrew University researchers have successfully engineered a cannabis plant with higher levels of cannabinoids, including THC, in the lab. The researchers, from the laboratory of Professor Alexander Vainstein at HU’s Robert H. Smith Faculty of Agriculture, Food, and Environment in Rehovot, partnered with and received funding from Mariana Bioscience, an Israeli-based R&D company founded in 2018, to develop superior technologies regarding the genetic improvement of cannabis. Prof. Vainstein led the project.

Researchers were able to successfully engineer and grow a cannabis plant with close to 17 percent higher levels of THC and 25 percent higher levels of CBG (cannabigerol), a non-psychoactive cannabinoid. The strain also had a 20 to 30 percent higher presence of terpenes, which are responsible for maximizing the euphoric effects of cannabis.

The researchers were able to engineer their own cannabis plant by “manipulating a plant-based virus that had first been neutralized so that it would not harm the plant,” according to a university statement. The researchers were able to create a version of this virus that would express the genes of the plant that influence the production of active substances.

Until now, there has been no way to tailor strains to produce certain cannabis substances or alter the ratio between them, Prof. Vainstein tells NoCamels. The results of this study are valuable to the medical researcher to cultivate and develop new strains for medical cannabis users and to increase the crop yield of active substances.

The researchers developed an innovative technology based on infection with an engineered virus to facilitate chemical reactions that increase quantities of desired substances. “We examined the infected plants and found that the levels of the substances in question had indeed risen, ” Vainstein said.

This is the first time researchers have succeeded in performing such a feat with cannabis plants, Vainstein says.

“It’s important to be able to generate more per the same amount of space. If you grow a plant in a greenhouse, for example, and you get a 20 percent improvement, the price of the material goes according to the compounds that you extract and the amount of extract actually dictates the price. So whoever is producing it will be very happy to make more for the same amount of space coverage,” Vainstein explains.

“I am not familiar with any approaches that can improve the production rate,” he adds, “So that makes it exciting for me as a researcher.”

The study’s goal was to develop a mechanism that would allow researchers to intervene in biochemical pathways of the cannabis plant and change the levels of active substances it produces. Eventually, the grower will be able to decide what components and how much of those components go into the cannabis strain.

According to the demand of the public, these strains can be produced by medical institutions or it can be produced by general users. The findings show that this technology will give the producer the ability to choose what the strain should or shouldn’t have. “One way of looking at it is as a way to get better material. Instead of having many compounds that you don’t care about, you will have specific compounds that are needed for a particular person or specific aromas or specific colors that will be added to the particular variety.

Vainstein uses aroma as an example of a component that can go into a cannabis strain. “We can add different aromas to the plant so they will generate not just cannabinoids, but also different aroma compounds. So it will smelly differently,” he says, “We’re already on this route with terpene production. So that’s a huge benefit, we hope.”

“In the future, we want to generate varieties using metabolic engineering approaches, based on the knowledge and experiments that were already performed,” Vainstein says, “We want to generate varieties that would produce specific cannabinoids or specific ratios.”

Vainstein added that more extensive experiments with the engineered plant are currently underway and should be available to cannabis industry leaders and medical research in the next few months

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Artificial intelligence and robotics are revolutionizing the agriculture industry. While the agriculture sector has had a number of groundbreaking achievements, or “revolutions,” over the last 100 years — from the debut of pesticides in the 1940s to precision agriculture and remote sensing in the 90s and 00s — in the present day, the introduction of AI, machine learning, robotics, and IoT has been a welcome addition to the modern farm.

Utilizing the power of AI and robotics, farmers can track the weather and locate pest infestations. They can ensure efficiency at their farms at lower costs, and, in the case of an Israeli crop intelligence solutions firm called AgroScout, collect data to monitor crop development in real-time.

AgroScout CEO Simcha Shore recently spoke of the impact of AI and robotics on traditional agriculture at the annual AI, Machine Vision, & Machine Learning conference last Wednesday. The conference was put together by New-Tech Events (part of New-Tech Magazines Group), an Israeli organizer of high-tech trade events, fairs, conventions, and exhibitions.

Shore’s company AgroScout has developed software that uses both AI and robotics to monitor crops in order to accurately plan processing and manufacturing operations. The solution also allows for quick and efficient detection of pets and disease, which could affect a field.

AgroScout was founded in 2017 and is currently located in the northern Israel community of Kibbutz Yiron, a place that used to be known for its vintage dairy farms that produced milk for companies like Tnuva, Israel’s largest food manufacturer. The company has raised $11.3 million, including $7.5 million in a Series A round in August 2021.

Shore refers to the way AgroScout’s platform utilizes these processes to showcase their significance to help nearly 500 million unserved farmers across the world.

Today, AI and robotics help farmers go from field level to almost plant level, he tells NoCamels days after the conference. “In Israel, we have scouts that walk the fields — something we started 70 to 80 years ago with cotton. It only caught on in the US and Israel. It didn’t catch on in the rest of the world because they don’t have the relevant people to do it. That’s one of the reasons we grow twice the amount of tons an acre than the majority of the farmers of the world,” he says, “I think this is an opportunity. That’s where we want to be. We want to be able to harness the drones, smartphones, and artificial intelligence to bring the finest ‘plant doctor’ or farmer to every farm and every plant on the globe.”

AgroScout enables its users to leverage AI-driven cloud computing technologies in “off-the-shelf hardware” in the form of smartphones and drones to deliver analytics that can manage crops. The software solution is provided in a mobile app that offers quality data on everything from crop yields, the standard measurement of the amount of crop production per unit of land area, to pest and disease monitoring to reduce the input of chemicals. Farmers and crop growers can also take images of the field with their smartphones and use an “Ask The Expert” feature to ask questions about the findings they’ve uncovered, in their own language.

Beyond the smartphone, AgroScout also uses small, commercial drones to collect data and take images that gather insights. According to Shore, farmers purchase their own low-cost drones – “$999 from Amazon” – to gather data.

“All we do is help you with our app. You put this small drone next to the field, and you draw a polygon of the field. IT’s going to fly around by itself. We turn that into a fully autonomous remote sensing algorithm. The base platform for data collection in a very agronomic farming kind of way,” says Shore, “The algorithm is going to drive that drone autonomously over a field at a certain height in a certain pattern to collect the relevant data that we need for the AI.”

Shore also points out that AgroScout brings in satellite data and weather data that has been collected over the last five years “over multiple seasons, multiple countries, multiple territories, multiple crops.” The company works with the largest processors in the world to capture images with a kind of resolution that is half a millimeter pixel and similar to human eyesight.

“Because we’re mimicking a person standing next to that plant in the field,” he adds.

Shore makes sure to emphasize that as much as it is about creating more crops more efficiently and at lower costs, it’s also about lessening the input of dangerous chemicals or pesticides.

“Today, if you’re a farmer, you’re going to go out and spray once a week a bunch of chemicals. You don’t really know what’s happening in the field, you have a best practice of this is what you should be putting out at this time. So the treatment is statistical,” he explains, “But if I can enable a farmer, say, for [US agriculture machinery manufacturer] John Deere to spray only half of the field or half of the chemicals, this is a tremendous reduction of the chemicals we don’t want to see in our food.”

Utilizing AI and robotics, AgroScout has reduced the inputs of irrigation fertilizer and chemicals by 10 percent. They’ve also increased crop yield by 10 percent, says Shore.

“We want to reach millions of hectares or acres of farmland and impact global food security. So the more crops I do, the more farmers and processors I reach, the more I’ve started to impact. My goal is to impact global food security. The goal is to help the people that grow our food grow more with less.”

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Premium automotive manufacturing brand MINI of BMW Group has brought Israeli venture capital fund Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), into its URBAN-X startup accelerator to help scale the next generation of climate tech companies to grow from Seed to Series B stages. 

MINI and JVP will leverage their global networks, strong strategic partnerships, and company-building expertise to support and scale climate-positive ideas that target cities due to their immense rate of carbon dioxide emissions and high-density populations. 

Founded in 2016, URBAN-X is an accelerator platform established by MINI that partners with startups to build technological solutions that reinforce sustainability in urban landscapes. It provides entrepreneurs with corporate strategies, engineering expertise, and design resources tailored to each startup, as well as a global network of investors and policymakers, to accelerate growth for their climate and city-focused ventures. URBAN-X has since invested in more than 71 startups across the globe, four of its portfolio companies have been acquired, and 88 percent of them have gone on to raise their next round of capital.

Now with JVP’s cooperation and its $1.6 billion under management, 160 investments, and 45 exits, startup founders will be granted access to a global network of public and private partners and receive hands-on guidance with customer discovery and engagement, product development, talent acquisition, and brand and network-building. Companies in the seed to Series B stage worldwide are encouraged to apply. 

“URBAN-X is committed to supporting the most promising innovators along their journeys as they move from idea to impact,” said Johan Schwind, managing director at URBAN-X. “Through this exciting new partnership with JVP, URBAN-X will have even more tools at our disposal to accelerate the development and deployment of transformative climate and urban technology solutions.”

“MINI was built on the foundation of innovative and sustainable urban design. With this heritage, we recognize the indispensable role that entrepreneurs, technologists and designers play in the vitality and longevity of our cities,” said Stefanie Wurst, Head of MINI. “In this next phase of URBAN-X, we’re proud to continue engaging with the most innovative minds within the business tackling some of society’s toughest challenges.”

URBAN-X is located in Newlab in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and in the international innovation center Margalit Startup City NYC. The Margalit Startup City model brings together public, private, and social impact stakeholders focused on cyber, fintech, food-tech, and ag-tech. The model provides a platform for comprehensive engagement with the latest technologies, academic research, and policymakers.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has given the alternative food industry a significant boost as consumers have become more interested in meat and seafood solutions that are sustainable and safer to eat. But even as lab-grown meat and other products have obtained significant backing from investors in the past few years, creating a cultured product requires ingredients, technologies, and processes that are just not cost effective.

This is the reason why it has been difficult for cultured food companies to commercialize these products and why you don’t see more of them in stores.

Mermade Seafoods, a Jerusalem-based startup that is growing scallops in a lab as its first product, tells NoCamels the company has unveiled a way to cut the hefty price tag of lab-grown food and an innovative process to produce it for the masses.

“We specifically target cultured seafood. We eventually want to replace the entire seafood industry, hopefully, the traditional one,” Mermade’s CEO Daniel Einhorn explains.

Food grown in a lab is created through a large collection of cells that are cultivated through fermentation in a bioreactor, or any manufactured device or system that supports a biologically active environment. Like any other normal, living organism, one needs to feed these cells and they produce waste. According to Einhorn, most companies give these cells fresh food and then discard the waste. Then they do the process over and over again. This becomes a very unsustainable process because it’s very expensive and because one needs to handle large volumes of waste.

Mermade Seafoods does not discard that waste. Instead, the company has developed a unique recycling process that allows them to reuse the waste over and over again. The biological recycling system is made from microalgae.

“We take that waste, which is rich in ammonia and carbon dioxide and we give it to the algae. The algae thrive on those materials — that is their food — so they grow and now you have a lot of algae. So if you choose the strains of algae right and you also do other sorts of biological magic – basically [natural] selection, then you can choose algae that produce the ingredients that you need. Ingredients that you can take from the algae and give back as feed for the cells,” Einhorn says. In short, “we grow microalgae on the waste produced by any animal cell culture and then upcycle that algae into useful growth medium ingredients.”

Founded just under a year ago, Mermade Seafood is in the pre-seed stage and has raised $1.5 million for its transformative technology, which aims to use to address the biggest challenges of the cell-based industry including high production costs and waste accumulation.

Einhorn tells NoCamels that as far as he knows Mermade is the only company using the fairly well-known aquacultural practice — aquaponics — in cellular agriculture, the production of animal-based products from cell cultures. Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture (growing fish and aquatic animals) and hydroponics (growing plants without soil) where plants are fed the waste of the aquatic animals. They are bringing this novel approach to the production of cell-based seafood.

Mermade has even coined a term for this use of aquaponics in cellular agriculture. “We call it cytoponics,” Einhorn says.

The company has chosen to focus on lab-grown scallops as its first product because while most of the cultured seafood companies concentrate on some type of fish — mainly salmon, tuna, and some white fish– “we just think that it’s smarter to start with something simple and then iterate from there,” he says, noting that the process to create scallops in the lab is less challenging than the food engineering that goes into cultured meat and poultry and plant-based fish. According to Einhorn, they are currently the only company to create cell-based scallops.

“We take stem cells from scallops and we multiply them until we have enough to create food out of it. And then you need to do it many, many times over to a significant mass,” he says.

While scallops are easiest to produce as a cultured product, once the company improves its current process, the goal is to create other cultured seafood products, like shellfish.

“The technology that I described can be used with any fermentation process. So essentially, once we get it under control, you can even reduce the costs of medication that uses this kind of fermentation process to produce different proteins. So it would be relevant to a lot of industries. It’s just that it’s the shortest path to do it with scallops, but it could be used with any other animal meat or any cell fermentation process,” says Einhorn.

According to Einhorn, Mermade wants to use this recycling process to help commercialize the entire spectrum of the cultured food industry and make them less costly on the shelves.

“It’s unclear that currently there is no other alternative to really reducing the cost of cultured meat and cultured meat is essentially an industry stuck on that point. I’m not saying that we’re the only ones who would eventually solve this…I’m just saying that…there’s really no other available alternative right now to lower costs enough for cultured meat to justify its commercialization. And that’s actually the real reason why you don’t see cell-based meats on shelves right now. There are other issues, but that’s the main one,” he says.

“That would be the shortest answer for why cultured meat is not on the shelves right now.”

The post Israeli Firm Reveals Innovative Process To Commercialize Lab-Grown Seafood appeared first on NoCamels.

Israeli renewable energy company Solegreen, signed a $130 million framework agreement with Tadiran Group to purchase energy storage systems totaling 600-megawatt hours from Tadiran’s subsidiary Aviem, for its solar energy installation projects, Globes reported.

Aviem has around 50 years of experience in developing electrical energy systems such as uninterruptible power systems, power suppliers and chargers, batteries, frequency converters, and electric vehicle charging systems for residential buildings. The company was acquired by Tadiran Group in October 2021 for NIS 30 million ($8.9 million). 

Aviem will design the energy systems according to Solegreen’s specification and include an integrated solution based on storage systems manufactured by German solar energy storage company SMA. 

Aviem will be responsible for the efficiency, availability, repairs, and storage capacity according to the agreed upon values in the framework agreement. The overall framework agreement also serves as an agreement to provide a warranty, preventative maintenance, and augmentation services for the systems designed by Aviem, for a basic period of five years. 

Founded in 2000, Solegreen specializes in the development, planning, construction, financing, and management of power generation facilities based on renewable energy and operates solar projects in Israel, Italy, Germany, Greece, and the U.S. It is a publicly traded company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Solegreen initiated its solar projects after its win in a competition helmed by the Israel Electric Authority for its project combining photovoltaic electricity production with energy storage capacity.

“We are reporting today on a framework agreement for implementing the purchase of a significant volume of storage systems,” Solegreen CEO Tom Shafran told Globes. “This agreement is expected to provide a solution to the company’s overall needs in the field of storage, for projects that Solegreen will build in Israel over the next two years. After a long and careful tender process conducted by Solegreen, which focused on an overall energy solution package, the company has selected the solution proposed by Tadiran, which was preferable on all levels to the other proposals.”

“The deal with Solegreen proves that acquiring Aviem has been very successful for the Group, and this is in a period of less than a year since the signing of the transaction,” added Moshe Mamrud, CEO and controlling shareholder of Tadiran. “We are proud to cooperate with a strategic partner like Solegreen, in a market with huge potential like the storage market. The aim of Tadiran was, and still is, to create a complete solution for all those who need energy storage. We will also continue to work to locate business and cooperation opportunities in the energy market over the coming year.”

“This is the largest ever deal in the energy storage market in Israel,” said Ran Abudi, CEO of Aviem. “Several months ago, we set a target of being the leading and most significant player in the energy storage market in Israel and indeed, in a relatively short time, the first target has been achieved. Solegreen was impressed by the capabilities of Aviam/Tensor and its knowhow and experience of more than 50 years, combined with engineering and implementation capabilities of the highest technological levels.”

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Bar-Ilan University announced this week the launch of its new campus research facility the Center for Energy and Sustainability, and its Multidisciplinary School for Sustainability and the Environment in the presence of Energy Minister Karine Elharrar, and officials from the Israel Electric Company (IEC) and the Doral Group. 

The university will invest hundreds of millions of shekels over the next ten years into training and technological research projects in and outside of Israel to develop hydrogen-based drones, clean energy fuel cells, green walls, and sodium-based batteries, among others. 

“As David Ben Gurion put it, security is energy,” said MK Elharrar. “We need a combination of different types of energy and the crisis in Europe shows that we can’t give up on any of them at the moment. We must lead the world of energy and an institute like the one inaugurated at Bar-Ilan is the place from which results will emerge. I welcome and hope for cooperation with the Ministry of Energy, because the connection between regulators, academia and those in the field is what will march the State of Israel forward.”

The Center for Energy and Sustainability includes 55 research groups, and it will focus on renewable energy R&D from early-stage to active technologies in collaboration with government ministries, entrepreneurs, tech-industrial companies, and experts in the fields of policy regulation, the environment, climate, sustainability, and education.

The research center will also cultivate a network of Israeli energy industry entrepreneurs and researchers to strengthen the center’s research output with regard to topics like network technology, AI, energy storage, hydrogen, current stability, and high voltage. 

The Multidisciplinary School for Sustainability and the Environment will bring all of the university’s environmental studies programs under one roof to teach and prepare students for environmental fields with dynamic curricula. The school will provide both hybrid and online courses, and it will be open to students from any academic discipline. 

“Energy and sustainability are intertwined,” said University President Prof. Arie Zaban. “If we don’t solve the energy problem, we won’t be able to operate in a sustainable environment.”

“Just like during COVID-19, we are faced with an existential need that requires mobilization of the minds,” said Amir Livne, IEC’s VP of Strategy. “This cannot be achieved without research and academia, and we have the best minds in the world here to meet this challenge.” 

“We are pleased and excited to collaborate with researchers at Bar-Ilan University, who are world leaders in the development of the energy and climate technologies of the future,” said Roee Furman, Managing Director of Doral Energy-Tech Ventures. “We are facing a decade of opportunities for real change in the fight against the climate crisis and we at Doral are proud to be a pioneering force in funding and supporting applied research that will place Israel at the forefront in the war on global warming.”

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