Published: 19 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
OVER THE NEXT 30 years, worldwide waste is expected to rise by a whopping 70 percent. Policymakers are being forced to grapple with new ways of dealing with it.
Among these are Israel’s new Environmental Protection Minister, Gila Gamliel, one of whose first acts has been to temporarily freeze ministry waste policy — including moves to build incineration plants — so that she can conduct a review.
Last Tuesday, to mark UN World Environment Day (which actually took place the previous Friday) she told the Knesset that the world was moving away from linear “produce, use and dump” policies toward a circular economy, where one person’s trash is another person’s resource and where “the concept of waste almost does not exist.”
On Wednesday, she announced the replacement of the ministry’s pro-incineration director general, Guy Samet, with David Yahalomi, a former finance director at the municipality of Gedera, in central Israel, where Gamliel grew up and where her brother has been mayor since 2008.
While at the council, Yahalomi led several environmental projects, among them an initiative to separate waste at source into three streams and establish recycling points, as well as a pilot composter project in cooperation with the Environmental Protection Ministry.
Environmental activists are hoping that Gamliel will dump the incinerator plan and adopt a policy far closer to that of the European Union.
Today, the buzzword, in environmental circles, at least, is circular economy.
FULL STORY With no time to waste, new environment minister signals support for recycling (Times of Israel)
Photo: Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel. (Courtesy, Environmental Protection Ministry)
