ISRAEL'S LITTLE-KNOWN FLING WITH COMPOSTING

As it left the starting blocks in its historic sprint for development, the young State found that it stumbled on a number of environmental hur-dles. Solid waste was among the first urban problems encountered. For Tel Aviv residents the problem was particularly acute. When the debris finally settled from the War of Independence, they felt that their garbage could no longer be ignored. The city's municipal dump, located near Mikveh Yisrael School, produced an odor that nauseated its neighbors. One of the new housing projects was built one hundred meters from the site, and residents could not tolerate the flies (because of the warm climate, it was estimated at the time that twenty-six generations of flies could breed during a single year in Israel^[15]). Residents filed suit against the city for creating a nui-sance. The problem was not unique to Tel Aviv. After ten years of national independence, only three cities (Jerusalem, Bat Yam, and Haifa) bothered to cover their garbage dumps with soil or ash in a sanitary fashion.

The Ministry of Health was asked to find an alternative site. The com-mittee run by sanitation experts Aaron Amrani and Hillel Shuval picked a rural location near a deserted Arab village southeast of the city; this area became known as “Hiriyah.” The site was selected because it was far from the city, with no neighbors, and seemed to pose little problem hydrologi-cally. (The proliferation of Ramat Gan and the vulnerability of the perme-able Coastal Aquifer were still unanticipated.) The city changed not only the routes of its garbage trucks but also its disposal techniques.

Because of the relatively high proportion of vegetables and fruits in the diet, Israel's trash has always had an unusually high organic content. The average moisture in household garbage during the 1960s was 60 percent during the dry season and 70 percent during winter.^[16] Given the technolo-gies of the time, incineration was an unattractive treatment option. On the other hand, the Ministries of Health and Agriculture agreed that com-posting offered a sensible alternative to imported fertilizers. In the 1950s, only 16 percent of Israel's trash was deemed noncompostable. This meant that the country's refuse had the potential for providing 25 percent of its national fertilizer needs.^[17] After Amrani took a fact-finding trip to Europe with the head of Tel Aviv's sanitation department, they returned as com-posting converts.^[18]

In response to the Ministry's exhortations, in 1953 Tel Aviv set up a garbage-screening plant on the old Mikveh Yisrael site. It was the first fully mechanized composting facility of its type in Israel and could process a thousand cubic meters of garbage a day. As soon as this facility proved feasible, three more compost facilities opened in Tel Aviv, and similar plants went into operation in Jerusalem and Ramla. Haifa's Dano Biostabilizers Company began to process sixty tons of garbage, converting one-third of the city's trash into compost.^[19]

The pièce de résistance was the 1.2-million-dollar, five-hundred-ton-per-day facility at the new Hiriyah garbage dump site. Today Hiriyah is an incongruous “Mount Trashmore,” towering above the coastal plain's mid-dle-class neighborhoods and greeting visitors after they land at Ben-Gurion Airport. Although it stopped receiving garbage in 1998, it remains a symbol of Israel's failure to confront its solid-waste problem during the country's first fifty years.^[20] Ironically, it started as a promising ecological innovation;^[21] when it opened, it may have been the largest composting production plant in the world.^[22] It produced a black, odorless humus that was sold for five dol-lars a cubic meter. The City of Tel Aviv was also able to pay the Dorr-Oliver company a subsidy of seventy-five cents per ton of raw garbage handled, from the savings accrued because of reductions in trash burial.^[23]

The waste conversion plants were not without their problems, and many were quickly closed.^[24] Nevertheless, many other facilities ran smoothly. By the end of the 1960s, composting reached its zenith. Sixty percent of Israeli trash was buried (half in sanitary landfills and half in open dumps). The remaining 40 percent was composted as an organic fer-tilizing agent, used primarily by the citrus industry.^[25] Yet as the Israeli synthetic fertilizer industry expanded and dumping prices dropped, the fa-cilities began to close, one by one. Squeezed by inadequate budgets, cities often opted for the cheapest disposal method: burial or burning.

Israel's solid-waste woes were not limited to disposal. Cities were spending as much as 20 percent of their budget on cleaning up. And yet a chronic problem of insufficient garbage receptacles in apartment buildings across the country remained unsolved.^[26] Conventional trash cans in pub-lic areas could hide bombs and constituted a security threat. Litter became an increasing nuisance, in particular in tourist areas that fell between the cracks of municipal jurisdictions. With Israel's generic litter law lacking any specific enforcement mechanism and no serious manpower to clean up public areas outside of cities, garbage became ubiquitous. For instance, in 1969 the shores of Lake Kinneret were so filled with rubbish that the Nature Reserves Authority was forced to step in and organize a cleanup.

Shlomo Bahalul, who supervised the operations, reported conditions so putrid that many of the men on the cleanup crew vomited.^[27]