Published: 26 March 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
BLACK SMOKE ACCOMPANIED by the suffocating stench of burning plastic has become the norm on the Lachish hills in southern central Israel. It’s coming from Palestinian villages in the area, which have developed a vast but illegal industry of burning discarded electronic appliances to extract their metal for resale.
This activity is unhealthy for everybody in the area but neither the Palestinian Authority or Israeli government have managed to put a stop to it. The political tension between the sides also put a halt to a project that attempted to reduce the damage but no results have been yielded.
Three Palestinian towns – Idhna, Deir Sammit and Beit Awwa, all west of Hebron – developed a brisk industry of fixing malfunctioning electronics such as computers and burning the ones they can’t fix.
Dr Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has been looking for solutions. In January him and two Canadian colleagues, John-Michael Davis and Grace Akese of Memorial University, published a paper in the Elsevier journal Geoforum on “e-waste hubs” in Lachish and elsewhere in the world.
FULL STORY Israelis and Palestinians fed up as bid to end burning of E-waste fails (Haaretz)
Photo: The burning of electronic waste at the West Bank village of Idhna (Leblond/Garb)
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