Israel, What Have You Done For Us Lately?

For sixty million of the world’s lakes, the growth of blue-green algae is a threat to their very survival. While algae furnish us with oxygen, and also provide food for fish, if produced in the right amounts, when they bloom to excess, they become harmful to fish, to humans, and to all other forms of wildlife. They turn lakes into “dead zones.” That is what is happening today. Rising temperatures and more sunlight, along with a buildup of nutrients from pollution and fertilizer runoff, cause the algae to bloom in excess, producing toxic compounds that can contaminate drinking water, make humans and wildlife sick, damage the environment, and kill fish.

To the rescue come two Israeli brothers, who think they have found a way to successfully treat large bodies of water to eliminate toxic algae bloom, completely cleaning up the surface and leaving no trace of the bloom.

It’s not a surprise that they should be Israelis, for the Jewish state has become a world leader in everything to do with water. It is a leader in waste water management, including recycling, in drip irrigation, in desalinization, and in producing water out of the air. And now these brothers have tackled the toxic algae threat to millions of lakes worldwide. Their story is told here.

“We are in uncharted waters, literally: we are making money out of lakes. No one has ever done that. We are the first company in the world that has cracked this field of treating large bodies of water, which is lakes and oceans,” Eyal Harel, the CEO of BlueGreen Water Technologies, told The Algemeiner.

BlueGreen Technologies has developed two treatments designed to eliminate cyanobacterial toxic blooms, leaving no trace in the water. The company claims these treatments can be applied to any body of water, and that the results can be seen in a matter of hours….

In 2020, BlueGreen had its biggest break with major projects in the US and China after completing its first international treatment of the 330-acre Chippewa Lake, the largest inland natural lake in Ohio, in August 2019. The treatment broke five years of high toxicity levels in the lake, which has since remained free of toxic algae, according to the water tech company….

With a record of complete success in ridding lakes of the toxic algae, from Ohio and Florida to China and South Africa, the brothers are ready for big investors to bring their company, BlueGreen, to a whole new level.

Israel has long been a world leader in everything to do with water. It has come up with more effective ways to harvest water while keeping crops watered to precisely the right amount, by using pinpoint drip irrigation. It has found a much improved way to desalinate water using membrane technology. This works by pushing saltwater into membranes containing microscopic pores. The water gets through, while the larger salt molecules are left behind. Microorganisms in seawater quickly colonize the membranes and block the pores, and controlling them ordinarily requires periodic costly and chemical-intensive cleaning. But an Israeli scientist, Edo Bar-Zeev, and his colleagues have developed a chemical-free way to clean using porous lava stone to capture the microorganisms before they reach the membranes. This is one of many breakthroughs in membrane technology made by Israelis that have made desalination much more efficient. Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination. One of the world’s driest countries now has a huge surfeit of water, and exports 105 million cubic meters of water to Jordan annually.

Israel leads the world in the recycling of water; fully 90% of its waste water ends up being recycled. It leads the world in drip irrigation techniques, so essential for farmers in water-poor lands. It leads the world, too, in innovative methods of desalination that provide more than half of the country’s domestic water. And now Israel’s culture of innovation has brought forth a way to rid the world’s 60 million lakes of the blue-green algae that has been turning them into dead zones, where no life is possible. With the Israeli company BlueGreen’s technology, those millions of lakes threatened by blue-green algae can once again be made safe for fish, for wildlife, and for humans, while the algae can be safely, and cheaply, eradicated.

The conclusion to be drawn, from this as from so many other advances made in the Jewish state: “Israel – don’t leave home without it.”