Technically a bean and also known as the black-eyed pea, cowpea has a strong spiritual symbolism in many cultures. 

For people from West Africa, it is a traditional symbol of fertility and a source of protection from the evil eye. It is eaten by many in the American south during New Year celebrations – and also has resonance for the Jewish New Year, when many Jews, especially those from Middle Eastern countries, eat it with the hope that it will bring abundance, wealth and fertility.

But aside from its symbolic properties, the cowpea is an incredibly resilient crop and nutritious food.   

Native to the vast Sahel region of Africa, the cowpea requires little water and fertilizer to grow, has a high heat tolerance and can be used in crop rotation, preparing the soil for other crops. 

“It’s non allergenic, it’s non-GMO. It contains almost all of the essential amino acids,” Better Pulse CEO Alon Karpol tells NoCamels. 

These qualities make it a sustainable alternative to dairy milk, which takes a heavy environmental toll. In fact, according to a University of Oxford study, producing a glass of dairy milk results in almost three times the greenhouse gas emissions of any plant-based milk production.  

Environmental concerns are one of the reasons why plant-based milk alternatives are a growing market. According to international market research company Grand View Research, the global dairy alternatives market size was valued at $29.18 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow annually by 12.6 percent between 2024 and 2030.  

Plant-based milks are produced by creating a powder from whichever protein is the source, with soy, oat, almond and rice being some of the most popular. The powder is mixed with water, oil and sometimes sugar and other flavorings, and then reconstituted for use. 

There is no consensus by experts, however, on which plant-based milk is the best overall.  Some look for nutritional value, while others favor one that most resembles dairy milk, has the best taste or uses the least resources.  

According to Karpol, the cowpea milk emulsifies and foams and is white in color like dairy milk and does not leave a strong taste of bean or grassiness – an issue with some milk alternatives. And the team at Better Pulse believe that it makes an ideal source for alternative milk, certain that consumers will agree. 

The idea to use the cowpea for plant-based milk was born when Karpol was approached by his longtime friend Ido Margalit, with whom he worked many years ago at a pharmaceutical company.   

After they parted ways professionally, Karpol went on to pursue a career in biochemistry research, while Margalit became an entrepreneur, focusing on agricultural technology. He ultimately co-founded the company BetterSeeds, which has re-coded the cowpea’s genetic makeup to make it suitable for mechanized harvesting.

Over a beer about two years ago, Margalit told Karpol about the cowpea, highlighting its nutritional value and resilience in the face of climate change. Karpol recalls Margalit quizzing him about the other potential uses for the bean.  

He dove in and learned about its nutritious properties, finding it hard to believe that it wasn’t already being used as an alternative to dairy milk.  

The bean boasts a list of other positive attributes, including its high amino acid content and exclusion as one of the eight major allergens. 

“It’s the staple food for many cultures,” Karpol says. “I’m so surprised to see there are no other companies using it [in this way].”

Better Pulse plans to initially introduce the cowpea to the market as a protein source for plant-based milk alternatives. But it also has bigger dreams for the bean. 

Working on a business to business (B2B) model, Better Pulse plans to market cowpea protein to food companies to be reformulated into non-dairy yogurt, coffee creamers and more, as well as a dairy milk alternative.   

It also has a license to use CRISPR technology – a powerful gene-editing tool that allows plant DNA to be modified with unprecedented precision and ease.   

“This is where the fun begins for me,” Karpol says of the technology.  

Better Pulse intends to use CRISPR to edit the protein inside the cowpea to make it even more nutritious, by removing the bean’s phytic acid, a benign compound that inhibits nutritional absorption.

Crucially, CRISPR technology is considered to be non-GMO in most parts of the world, including in the United States and Israel, even though is currently seen as such in Europe.  

Until recently, the Better Pulse team had raised $250,000 from their own personal network. They are now in the pre-seed round, and have so far raised $100,000 from an angel investor and received a $400,000 grant from the Israel Innovation Authority for their CRISPR work. The target of the round is $1 million, Karpol says. 

Like many Israeli startups following the mass terror attack of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent and ongoing war, the company has faced challenges. Its food technologist, David Etienne, has spent six of the last 11 months serving in Gaza as a reserve soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. 

But, like the company’s beloved protein source, Better Pulse has proven to be resilient. And Etienne has used his breaks from reserve duty to continue his work with the cowpea. 

“We’ve found ways to overcome [the challenges],” Karpol explains. “We are pushing hard.”

The company has just completed its lab tests and pilot, and is confident it can scale it up very quickly and even start selling that within the next three to four months. 

Karpol says the cowpea milk has passed several taste tests, even by the pickiest of critics – his own children. 

“And if they think it’s good,” he says, “it’s good!”  

The post Resilient And Nutritious New Plant-Based Milk Aims To Make A Splash   appeared first on NoCamels.

Global market data company Innova says in 2023, nearly two-thirds of consumers worldwide bought some form of chocolate. And according to international consumer insights firm Statista, the chocolate market is today worth $133 billion – and is expected to grow every year by close to five percent.

But chocolate comes at a price that goes beyond what we pay in the shops. The industry has a heavy impact on the environment, and Israeli startup Celleste Bio is determined to change that with its lab-cultivated cocoa beans.

The World Wildlife Fund says that farmers who grow the cocoa beans – 70 percent of whom are in the West African countries of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon – tend to clear tropical forests to plant new cocoa trees, rather than reusing the same land. Because of this, West Africa is experiencing massive deforestation.

But the environmental toll does not end there. Two other common ingredients in chocolate – soy and palm oil – are also major causes of deforestation around the world.

And while some chocolate manufacturers, such as Germany’s Ritter Sport and Tony’s Chocolonely of the Netherlands, do have sustainable practices, this has yet to take hold in the industry as a whole.

But Celleste Bio says it has the answer – cultivating cocoa in the lab, from cocoa beans, that is indistinguishable from farmed cocoa.

“We’re the real thing, because we’ve found a way to produce 100 percent natural cocoa without all the limitations and the problems that this broken supply chain has,” Celleste CEO Michal Beressi Golomb tells NoCamels.

The lab-cultivated cocoa is grown from just a couple of actual beans, which can be repeatedly reproduced, and without, Beressi Golomb says, “having to cut a single tree again.”

The Misgav-based company’s unique method uses cell culture technology to create the cocoa beans, and combines it with AI modeling to create the optimal growing conditions. These bean cells are then used to make the cocoa butter needed to manufacture chocolate, which has the identical chemical profile to the original.

“We are the first in the world to have been able to produce chocolate-grade cocoa butter,” Beressi Golomb says. “We’re really excited about it.”

She explains that the company takes the cells from one or two cocoa beans and places them in a liquid culture in a bioreactor. The cells rapidly multiply and are harvested to obtain the butter.

It takes just seven days for the bean cells to mature in the bioreactor so that the butter can be harvested. Celleste also produces cocoa powder from the remainder of the beans once the butter is extracted.

And no stage of the process involves genetic modification, a fact Beressi Golomb makes sure to stress.

The unique environment, according to Beressi Golomb, makes the cocoa bean cells think that they are growing in a pod on a tree.

“We’re using the bioreactor as our forest,” she says.

This means that the bean cells can be grown anywhere in the world, regardless of climate, and not just in the traditional hot countries around the equator.

“They just grow over and over again, it’s a continuous cycle,” she says. “We don’t need more trees.”

Beressi Golomb points out that the company’s method also eradicates high-quality beans’ vulnerability to pests and disease, a sensitivity that devastated the Brazilian cocoa bean industry – downgrading it from the world’s second-largest cocoa producer 40 years ago to just the seventh-largest today.

She warns that West African cocoa farmers are now facing a similar situation, making a new solution all the more urgent.

Celleste Bio was established in late 2022, two years after its founders began working on a way to make chocolate healthier. But, Beressi Golomb says, with support of Israeli agritech and foodtech incubator Trendlines, they soon pivoted to cultivating cocoa for the industry.

The company soon caught the interest of American multinational Mondelez, one of the largest food companies in the world, whose portfolio includes global chocolate brands such as Cadbury, Milka, Côte d’Or and Fry’s. And today the food giant is Celleste’s strategic investor.

“They’re a great partner and they’re very excited about it,” says Beressi Golomb.

Others are working on similar solutions, she says, primarily companies in the US, Switzerland and Israel, but they are all focused on cocoa powder and none have been able to produce cocoa butter.

Even so, she qualifies, with such a huge market for both cocoa butter and cocoa powder, each worth billions of dollars, there is room for more than one company.

Celleste has already produced its proof of concept in the form of its chocolate-grade cocoa butter, and is now focusing on upscaling its process, with the objectives of both creating a 50,000 liter bioreactor (it is currently aiming for a 1,000 liter bioreactor within a year) and being ready for market in 2027.

“We’re here to save the chocolate industry,” says Beressi Golomb, “and to ensure that everybody can eat chocolate and feel good about it.”

The post Chocolate From Cultivated Cocoa Comes Without Environmental Toll  appeared first on NoCamels.

Plastic Back uses a proprietary method that takes discarded polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, and breaks it down into its components of crude oil and chlorine, both of which are then reused. 

“Plastic is made from oil, so we are converting it back to what it was made from,” Plastic Back co-founder and CEO Tal Cohen tells NoCamels. 

“And once we’re able to do that, we can use that oil in the production of new plastics or different petrochemical applications.” 

PVC is ubiquitous in our lives. It is the world’s third-most widely produced synthetic plastic polymer and used for multiple applications in multiple industries, including for pipes in construction, medical devices and packaging. 

And, according to Cohen, although some 40 million tons of the polymer are produced every year, the long-standing inability to fully recycle it has a direct impact on the green credentials of those industries that use it.   

Almost all substances in the world – including the oil used to create plastic – are made from carbon, Cohen explains, and Plastic Back‘s chemical process is able to attack the carbon bonds of the PVC and break them down into their former form. 

Plastic Back also treats the chlorine that is present in PVC, which Cohen says has always been “the bottleneck in the recycling processes” due to the difficulty in repurposing it. This means while PVC is one of the most commonly produced plastic polymers, the chlorine content has it made least recycled. 

The company’s dechlorination process transforms it into salts that according to Cohen have a range of applications, including the production of new PVC.

“Because we’re able to take both the carbon and the chlorine content, Plastic Back is the first chemical company that is able to do the complete cycle for PVC,” he says.

Other companies are working on ways to convert plastics back to oil, but Cohen says that they are mostly in early stages of development and are struggling to actually recycle PVC. 

“Existing solutions are able to [treat] one or maybe two percent of PVC in their recycling processes,” he says. 

“We’ve shown that we can take up to 100% PVC, which was never seen before.“ 

Furthermore, Cohen explains, the other solutions involve a conversion process that relies on very high temperatures of between 500 and 1,000 degrees Celsius to break down the carbon, which is extremely energy inefficient. Plastic Back’s solution, however, only needs to heat the substance to 100 degrees Celsius. 

It places the PVC in a reactor, which Cohen compares to a big silo, where it is heated up and, due to Plastic Back’s unique process, “the magic happens.” 

The company has two sources for the PVC it recycles – plastic manufacturing companies and recycling facilities that try to treat the waste themselves.  

“They recycle what they can, and the rest, instead of being sent to landfills, can come to Plastic Back,” says Cohen. 

By removing waste from landfills, the company is also helping to mitigate a growing problem around the world. 

For according to the World Bank, 2.01 billion metric tons of municipal solid waste are produced every year – an amount expected to rise to 3.4 billion metric tonnes by 2050 – and at least 33 percent of it is not managed in an environmentally safe manner.

The company was founded in 2018, when Cohen, who has a background in marine biology and chemistry, was looking for a business opportunity that tackled environmental issues.  

“I got a chance to see what plastic pollution really looks like in the ocean,” he says. “And I knew I wanted to do something related to that.” 

Cohen became aware of the technology that was at the time being developed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and reached out to its developers. 

“I thought that they had reached a very good proof of concept, showed good potential and a good market, and we decided to go for it,” he recalls. 

“Once we found that gap in the industry, and also our technology relevance, that was our market fit.” 

Cohen praises the technology transfer companies created by academic research institutions, including Yissum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he says should be a priority for entrepreneurs seeking new opportunities that have economic and technological feasibility.

Funding initially came from an angel investor who Cohen says “really believed” in the company. After that, the proof of concepts attracted further funding, including from the Israel Innovation Authority and Ministry of Energy, and later investment came from venture capital funds both in Israel and Europe.  

Cohen says that the past year or so has been a challenge, with widespread protests in Israel over proposed judicial reforms and the ongoing war that started with a massive terror attack by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7. 

“Israel is a very small country, so everyone was affected, either firsthand or secondhand, by the situation,” he says. “It does change the atmosphere in the lab, in the company, in the country… but also brings people together.” 

Cohen believes that the fact that the company has managed to stay on course for reaching its milestones during this period has also proved its viability to current and future external partners.   

Plastic Back is now fine-tuning the R&D process at its base in Ness Ziona, a town just outside Tel Aviv that has become a favored location for Israeli innovation. 

And while the company has its eye on making inroads in Europe, the United States and Asia, it will maintain its base in Israel.

“We’re an Israeli company,” says Cohen. “Most of the R&D will stay here, and while we do realize that we will have a footprint in these locations, we’ll continue to stay an Israeli company.”

One of those locations is Thailand, where Plastic Back has an agreement with SCG Chemicals, a major producer of PVC. Other similar petrochemicals companies have shown an interest in the startup, and the first pilot, expected to begin in 2025, will be in association with one of them.  

“We are targeting to have 100,000 tons of PVC treated per annum by 2028,” he says. “So that means we have to really get working!” 

The post Plastic Fantastic: Startup Takes PVC Back To Its Crude Oil Roots  appeared first on NoCamels.

That’s the vision of BomVento, a young Israeli startup developing a special coating for the blades on wind turbines that will extract greenhouse gasses (GHG) from the air even as the massive machines themselves generate power. 

“As you approach the problem of global warming, it’s clear that today there are targets for reducing emissions, but they are not being met systematically for economical, geopolitical reasons,” BomVento co-founder and CEO Yuri Tsitrinbaum tells NoCamels. 

As such, he explains, solutions that in the past had seemed “ridiculously irrelevant,” such as the removal of GHG from the atmosphere, are being increasingly seen as a viable option.

“If we can’t really control emissions, we need to control what’s in the atmosphere,” he says. “And another way to manage that is by reducing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere.” 

An April 2023 report by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that greenhouse gasses have reached historically high rates of growth and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now 50 percent higher than pre-industrial levels. 

One of the greatest challenges of reducing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere was the expense, Tsitrinbaum says. 

The cost per ton of greenhouse gasses removed must be under $100 to be viable,  he explains. But according to David Webb, the chief sustainability officer at Boston Consulting Group, one of the “big three” strategy consulting firms in the world, the current cost is $600-$1,000 per ton. 

Furthermore, Tsitrinbaum says, it has proven to be extremely difficult to scale up any solution for removing GHG from the atmosphere. 

“If you can only do it on a very small scale, that’s meaningless,” he says. “It’s not enough to reduce 1,000 or 2,000 tons.”  

And it is these two issues that the BomVento solution seeks to address. 

The company says that its coating would bring the cost of removing GHGs from the atmosphere to less than $50 per ton. And the increasing number of wind turbines in use across the world means that there is no shortage of blades to cover. More than 90 percent of the turbines are onshore, but the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that the number of offshore wind farms will increase around the world in the coming years as more countries move to adopt the technology.  

Wind power today generates 10 percent of global electricity, according to the World Wind Energy Association, with a 12 percent rise in the amount of power created in 2023. 

In fact, the IEA is calling for an average annual growth of 17 percent in order to be on track with the plan laid out in the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change to reach net zero emissions by 2050.  

The startup’s solution, coating the blades of turbines with a patented material that triggers a chemical reaction through photocatalysis (using light exposure to create the sought-after effect). 

“It’s a chemical process that allows us to reduce a greenhouse gas into an environmentally benign product,” Tsitrinbaum says. 

The light source to trigger the chemical reaction, which breaks up greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide into benign separate elements, would be placed at the base of each wind turbine, and require about five percent of the energy the machine creates.

He compares the process to that of a catalytic converter, the chamber installed in every non-electrical vehicle that he says reduces the amount of emissions by up to 70 percent. 

“We’re applying a close enough process to large volumes of atmospheric air,” he says. 

Tsitrinbaum predicts that each turbine using the BomVento solution could conceivably remove up to 10,000 tons of GHGs per year. And with some 300,000 turbines currently in use globally, that translates to a potential 3 billion tons of GHGs being extracted from the atmosphere annually.  

The Tel Aviv-based company was established in 2022, after Tsitrinbaum says he came to the conclusion that he could do more to contribute outside of the nonprofit ecosystem.  

“I decided that business as a driver for change is more sustainable,” he says, which led him to the renewable energy sector. He worked for several years for a company that provides renewable energy in emerging markets before setting up BomVento. 

“I felt that this is the right time in terms of my maturity, experience [and] financial backbone to go into my own entrepreneurial journey,” he says.

While there are a multitude of companies working to reduce the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere, there are no others developing a solution akin to the one devised by BomVento. 

Even so, Tsitrinbaum recently told a German magazine, given the gravity of the problem, they should not be seen as rivals but rather as fellow travelers working towards a shared goal. 

BomVento  is a member of the startup ecosystem at the Israeli National Center of Blue Economy and Innovation, which focuses on innovative marine technologies, and in 2023 it was named a finalist in the Israeli Climate Awards held by Calcalist business website and Doral Energy-Tech Ventures.  

Tsitrinbaum believes it will take a year and half to fully develop proof of concept and another two and a half years before the coating is ready for commercial purposes. 

The company has previously received backing from the “amazing” Center of Blue Economy, as well as a grant from the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology and investment from a venture capital firm, all of which will support it as it reaches the proof of concept stage.  

Now, BomVento is seeking future funding as it makes what Tsitrinbaum calls the “significant leap” to what it believes can be done.

The post Transforming Wind Turbines Into Killers Of Greenhouse Gasses appeared first on NoCamels.

For an industry that is traditionally slow to evolve, says Nayam Wings CEO and co-founder Saar Carmeli, regulatory changes to reduce pollution of the past decade have been daunting. 

Almost all water-bound vessels are today solely powered by electric motors or combustion engines, and Carmeli, a captain in the Israeli Navy reserves, says this situation has to change.

But, he says, while many industries have begun to move towards renewable, clean energy such as solar, the maritime world has more or less remained constant. 

“The maritime industry is very conservative,” Carmeli tells NoCamels. “In general, it hasn’t changed for 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution. Man discovered the combustion engine, started using it, and never stopped till this day.” 

In recent years, however, there has been a growing understanding of the dangers of ship emissions and the sicknesses they can cause, in particular along coastlines. 

The issue was raised at the United Nations climate change conference in France in 2015, which led to the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. 

“Shipping companies need to comply with these regulations, and they actually don’t know what to do,” Carmeli says. 

Cleaner fuels are the future, he explains, but they are very expensive. Which is where Nayam Wings sails into view. 

The startup’s unique propulsion system uses rigid, asymmetric wings as sails, based on the principles of aviation to maximize aerodynamics for the ship using them, a concept that Carmeli says bypassed the maritime industry. 

“The shipping industry never met the Wright brothers’ development,” he says, referring to the pioneers of aviation who built and flew the first ever airplane in 1903. “So aerodynamics didn’t reach ships.”  

Several companies have already incorporated the principles of aviation aerodynamics into their development of new propulsion for ships, using rigid wings as sails. 

“It’s a new breed of sails based on aircraft technology,” Carmeli says. “They did a great job of converting the market and educating the market.”

But Nayam Wings “took it a step further” – basing their design on the actual wings from an airplane and adjusting it to meet the needs of a ship.  

And unlike other companies developing rigid wings that use symmetrical elements, Carmeli explains that their wings are asymmetrical, just like airplane wings, in order to reduce drag, maximize the propulsion provided by wind power and to cope with different wind speeds. The system uses AI and advanced algorithms to determine which way the wind is blowing and adjusts the wings accordingly.

The wings are designed to reduce the amount of fuel and not impact on the speed of the ship, says Avishay Parker, Nayam Wing’s co-founder and COO and an Israeli Navy reserves commander.  

“The ship will not change its speed, because the time to market for the maritime industry is extremely important,” Parker tells NoCamels.

“It’s a hybrid propulsion,” he explains. “The engine is working, but it needs less effort to bring the ship to the same speed.  The wind is producing an amount of power, and the engine and the speed stay the same.” 

The wings are designed for use on bulk carriers or bulker tankers – merchant ships that carry unpackaged cargo such as oil, grain or cement in their holds – as opposed to container ships that can also carry containers on their decks. And most merchant ships, explains Parker, are bulkers and tankers.

The idea of using the wings to incorporate wind power into ship propulsion in order to reduce fuel consumption came from the company’s third co-founder and its chairman and CTO Amnon Asscher, whom Parker describes as an extremely experienced aeronautical engineer and sailor. 

The company actually takes its name from an amalgamation of his children’s names – Yanai and Maayan. 

Carmeli says the company tested two proof of concept models themselves, and then again with Israel Aerospace Industries, the major state-owned manufacturer with which Nayam Wings has an ongoing collaboration.  

“The results were magnificent,” he says, which allowed the company to predict that their inclusion on a ship can lead to a 15-25 percent fuel reduction for retrofitted installations and a 35 percent reduction for new-build ships. 

For now, the company is raising the $3.5 million it needs to build the first full-scale prototype and believes that funding round will be completed by the end of the year. 

It is also part of the startup ecosystem at the Israeli National Center of Blue Economy and Innovation, an organization focused on innovative marine technologies. The company will also appear at the Center’s conference in Haifa next month.

The patent for the technology is currently registered in Europe and the company has already signed a Letter of Intent (LoI) with leading shipping agency Dynamic Shipping, which is based in Haifa and has a cement carrier that Parker says is suitable for installing the Nayam Wings prototype due to a special base that it has on deck.

“They understand this is the future of the shipping market,” says Parker. “They understand that a hybrid solution can save a lot of money because of the fuel reduction.” 

The post Ships Get Wind In Their Sails With Fuel-Reducing, Aerodynamic ‘Wings’ appeared first on NoCamels.

Co-Energy has created a way of making plastic and organic waste into high-demand energy commodities that include electricity, hydrogen, fuel and biochar – a type of charcoal made by processing organic material that is often used to improve soil health as it can help retain water and nutrients. 

The field of waste-to-value has been around for decades, Co-Energy CEO Aviv Dekel tells NoCamels, but the market faced two obstacles: the technological challenge of making the waste into a resource, and making that technology attractive to potential users. 

“We have conquered both of those challenges,” Dekel says. 

Co-Energy’s technology involves a process called pyrolysis, whereby materials like wood or plastic are heated to very high temperatures without the use of oxygen. 

And because there’s no oxygen, the materials don’t burn, and instead are broken down. This process can transform substances like wood into biochar and plastics into a form of oil or gas.

The company developed a paralytic reactor – a chamber where the pyrolysis occurs – that works continuously, rather than processing the material in batches. 

“There is constant energy being generated,” Dekel says. 

The technology also overcomes many of the challenges presented by dealing with multiple kinds of waste matter. 

Waste comes in many forms, and the Co-Energy platform can work with different types of parameters, such as moisture and mass, in order to generate that consistent and reliable stream of energy.

“The technology needs to be robust on one hand and sensitive on the other,” Dekel explains. 

“We developed a sophisticated system that measures all these different parameters and works at very high temperatures.”  

Established in 2014 by three co-founders with expertise in chemistry, mechanical and material engineering, the Yehud-based company focused on tackling the challenge of transforming plastic and organic waste into a valuable resource. 

Dekel says that it took Co-Energy four years of research and development to reach a level of confidence in the technology to go to market. 

The company’s patented, proprietary technology is now actually able to turn one ton of plastic waste into 2.5 megawatts of electricity. And that, according to the US Department of Energy, could power 1,625 homes for a year. 

Plastic waste is one of the world’s most pressing issues. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), plastic waste made up about 12 percent of the total municipal solid waste in the United States in 2018 – which amounts to 35.7 million tons. However, only about 9 percent of that plastic waste was recycled, and the majority ended up in landfills.

These landfills pose significant environmental threats due to plastic’s long decomposition time, which can span hundreds or even thousands of years. During this period, the plastic can release harmful chemicals into the soil and groundwater, leading to potential contamination of natural resources. 

And Co-Energy is now able to take that plastic waste and convert it not just into fuel and electricity, but also to hydrogen, a material used in a plethora of industrial processes. 

Dekel says that as the company expands its customer base, it is constantly working to expand its capabilities and flexibility in the waste-to-value process, so as to accommodate as many different waste forms as it can. 

Today Co-Energy’s clients include municipalities, recycling companies and even major manufacturers that have large amounts of plastic or agricultural waste to treat. 

Currently operating in Israel, the company works on a business-to-business model, adhering to the national regulations regarding waste treatment for each project. 

In its most recent project at the Elcon Recycling Center in the Negev, Co-Energy is using three reactors each processing half a ton of plastic waste per hour, rising to two tons per hour after six months. This more intensive process can convert the waste to 22 million liters of fuel per year.

Meanwhile, another project that began in December 2022 treats organic waste such as wood, sludge and vegetation at a rate of 3 tons per hour to create biochar.

Dekel explains that creating biochar involves careful monitoring of the process in order to maximize the outcome. 

“This realm of organic waste is very difficult to convert to energy in an efficient manner, because it’s very low in its caloric value to start with,” she says. 

“But we stop the process right before the material is fully evaporated, and then you get the wonderful product biochar, which is well known all around the world.” 

According to Dekel, the company’s biggest competitor is foreign waste facilities, leading to Co-Energy having to convince institutions to process their waste for profit instead of selling it abroad. 

“You take the waste that everybody wants to get rid of, and you turn it into a commodity that can generate over $400 or $500 per ton,” she explains. “That’s taking the notion of circular economy three steps forward.”  

The company is proudly entirely bootstrapped and is currently not looking for funding. With successful projects in Israel to show, Co-Energy has now received interest from international customers, specifically in Mexico and Australia. 

“We have very impressive pipelines of projects, in different stages of negotiations, we are definitely expanding our businesses overseas,” Dekel says. 

In the future, the company aims to take the waste-to-value process and place it in the larger context of climate change, helping countries achieve their net zero pledges for carbon emissions. 

Co-Energy believes that waste-to-value is one of the most impactful ways to reduce a country’s overall emissions. 

“We need to make renewable energy affordable and accessible, and by utilizing waste through our process, we can complement these initiatives and really hit all those different checkboxes in the market,” Dekel says. 

“We really try, as a company philosophy, to work in an overarching manner, to try to tick as many of those boxes as we can.” 

The post Plastic To Power: Startup Changing Face Of Waste Conversion appeared first on NoCamels.

When a plant is over fertilized, whatever nutrients it doesn’t need are funneled down into the soil and water, with potentially disastrous results for them and the plants. It is like giving all three – plant, soil and water – an overdose of salt-rich fertilizer.   

Israeli company Yevul Info has developed an AI-enhanced solution designed to prevent this overfertilization and ensure optimal plant health, helping to meet the demands of feeding an expanding world population amid changes in our climate. 

“We actually can contribute to enhanced yields and promote sustainable farming practices,” Yevul CEO and co-founder Keren Avriel-Sadan tells NoCamels. 

“We do it by detecting the early signs of nutritional issues and preventing fertilizers overdose and yield waste.” 

The Leaf Guardian platform monitors plants grown with fertigation, the technique of supplying dissolved fertilizer to crops through irrigation. It uses round the clock precision agriculture – improving crop health and yields through the use of cameras, sensors and other advanced technology – to observe changes in the green color of the leaves that could indicate a problem.   

This allows the platform to detect almost indiscernible signs of plant deterioration due to overfertilization days before visible symptoms appear. 

And this not only prevents a fertilizer overdose that can ultimately lead to yield waste, but also ensures that the precious plants are not starved of food. 

Yevul (the Hebrew word for crop) explains that accepted farming protocol is to use more fertilizer than needed, in an effort to boost immunity to hazards like disease, cold or heat stress.

But this is a flawed method, which in the best case scenario results in wasted fertilizer, as the surplus leaches into the ground and pollutes it and the water. In the worst case, excess fertilizing causes salinization, the accumulation of salt in the water, actively poisoning the environment and resulting in lost yield.

Through the use of its patented algorithm and machine learning to track the crops throughout their lifetime, the platform immediately takes action if and when needed.  

“It detects early signs of plant deterioration days before visible symptoms appear, and adjusts nutrition [as part of] continuous, dynamic monitoring,” Avriel-Sadan says of Leaf Guardian. 

For while a farmer can typically only see the symptoms or the results a week to 10 days after implementing a change, the algorithm runs and analyzes the processes and knows what is going on inside the crop in real time.  

“Although we appreciate the farmers’ expertise, we know that [while] he goes out to the field and sees a green, healthy crop, we can know that something is happening inside the crop,” Avriel-Sadan says. 

Should it detect any worrying changes, Leaf Guardian sends a simple alert message to the farmer, advising them to increase or decrease the amount of fertilizer in the irrigation water. 

It will issue a second alert several days later, informing the farmer that either all is now well or that further steps need to be taken to preserve the plants.  

“We provide actions to take at every stage of the crop’s life,” says Avriel-Sadan. 

The platform is currently in its prototype phase, so the alerts are for now communicated through the WhatsApp instant messaging platform, a method Avriel-Sadan says works very well for the farmers.

She explains that farmers are generally less interested in statistics and diagrams, and so the company instead provides the information that they need at that moment in order to best manage their crops. 

“It’s very important to us, the simplicity of usage for farmers,” she says.   

Although Yevul’s focus is on fertigation, the alerts can also be adapted to monitor plants for attacks by pests or an already existing disease.   

Yevul was founded in 2022 by Avriel-Sadan, along with its CTO Agronomy Yochai Isack, and CTO Ezer Miller, a data scientist and machine learning developer. 

Isack and Miller met at the Hebrew University while pursuing their respective PhDs at the Faculty of Agriculture. They began to explore a solution to the problem of crop overfeeding and its resultant weaker crops and financial losses, which evolved into Leaf Guardian. 

“They were searching for a solution and there was great synergy between these two people – a mathematics guy and an agronomist,” Avriel-Sadan says.  

Avriel-Sadan joined as an experienced entrepreneur in the field of agricultural technology, bringing deep knowledge of sustainable farming and an understanding of the farming industry’s need for a product like Leaf Guardian.   

“My main driver is sustainability,” she says. “A lot of people don’t realize that it can be so easy to save the world from this contamination.” 

Yevul is today part of the Galil Ofek Incubator for life science startups, and has so far raised over $1 million, with some investment coming from the Israel Innovation Authority, the brand of the government dedicated to promoting the national high-tech sector.  

Avriel-Sadan says most of the interest in the platform has come from countries such as Brazil, China, Germany and South Africa, where farmers are penalized for the overuse of fertilizer.  

“Instead of paying a penalty, you can buy this solution,” she says. 

And although Yevul has worked extensively with Israeli farmers in the past, she explains that the first customers have come from outside of the country as Israeli farmers have been focused elsewhere due to the terror attack of October 7 and the ongoing war with Hamas in Gaza, which perpetrated it.  

The company has also been personally impacted by the war. It had to relocate from the Golan Heights-based Shamir Research Institute, where it had completed most of the R&D on Guardian Leaf, due to the constant bombing of northern Israel by Hezbollah in Lebanon that began on October 8.  

Even so, Avriel-Sadan is full of praise for the company’s new home at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Rehovot campus, where they now work with world-renowned molecular physiologist Prof.  Menachem Moshelion. This opportunity, she says, is akin to finding the holy grail. 

As Yevul reaches the end of its R&D phase, its founders say they are looking forward to new partnerships in their pioneering approach to crop management, which Avriel-Sadan refers to as “fertigation 5.0.”   

“I believe in Yevul Info because it represents the future of agriculture, one where technology and data analytics converge to create smarter, more efficient farming practices,” she says. 

The post AI Platform Watches Crops 24/7 To Prevent A Fertilizer Overdose appeared first on NoCamels.

TreeTube, an Israeli startup from the central city of Ramat Gan, has developed a way to allow trees to flourish in urban settings, even with the challenges posed by the needs of utility companies that take precedence over natural features. The issue is primarily due to the dense compaction of the ground that makes it a difficult environment for trees, rather than the utilities companies themselves.

Today, construction projects make roads, pavements and buildings their priority and only consider greenery if there is any budget surplus, explains TreeTube Co-founder Jonathan Antebi. And, he warns, this decision not to prioritize green spaces will lead to disastrous results for climate change in our cities.

“You need to have a space for electricity, gas, water, sewage, drainage, communication,” he tells NoCamels. “There also needs to be a place for trees – a green utility.”

Trees, he explains, need non-compacted ground like in forests, not the 98 percent compaction that civil engineers insist on.

As a result, he says, more than 30 percent of urban trees stop growing in the first three to five years, and far  more than that fail to reach the age of 10.

Unless trees manage to damage their man-made environment, they are stuck, ultimately making them more vulnerable to diseases and eventually causing them to die.

“Trees need soil, air and water, which is relatively challenging in compacted paved areas,” he says.

Trees are crucial for keeping temperatures down in cities, offering cool and shady spots among the buildings as well as reducing polluting carbon emissions in the atmosphere. 

“Trees are fantastic filters,” says Antebi. “They are one of the utilities that have an actual return on investment to a municipality. Each healthy mature tree contributes close to $275 each year to the city through all its benefits.” 

Tree canopies can bring the temperature down by as much as eight degrees Celsius, he says. But in reality, he explains, the area under trees feels far cooler because the leaves and the branches circulate the air more effectively.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the agency tasked with promoting sustainable growth worldwide, also believes that trees are vital to a thriving urban environment.

“The value of a tree is embedded in every breath we take,” it says. 

“The ecosystem services it provides are practically invaluable: it absorbs and removes carbon and replaces it with oxygen, it reduces air pollution in cities, holds the soil together to prevent landslides and stormwater runoff, it shields us from cold winds and creates a shadow we can hide in from the sun.”

In fact, Antebi says, TreeTube meets several of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by all UN member states in 2015, which are designed to improve the lives of everyone on the planet.

The SDGs that TreeTube meets are related to the issues of health and well-being; clean water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; industry, innovation and infrastructure; sustainable cities and communities; climate action; and life on land.

“We needed to act differently in order to be able to handle these goals,” Antebi says.

TreeTube’s patented, proprietary solution is – as its name suggests – massive tubes made of inert plastic material, 25 percent of which is recycled, that are fitted together like blocks and placed under roads and walkways alongside the pipes and cables for infrastructure.

The soil-filled system directs the roots to a secondary habitat through different openings, allowing nature and modernity to coexist.

Antebi describes the TreeTubes system as a cost-effective solution with a fast and easy installation that industrializes urban tree plantation, providing soil for the trees as well as access to air and water.

The installation of the trees is quick and efficient, he says, and can be done within hours. The pavement is removed and room is created for the system between the existing infrastructure for utilities. The system is then placed in the ground and the area around it filled in, compacted and repaved.

The tubes have already been used in Israel, the Netherlands and Estonia, to great success. The company works primarily with local authorities as well as landscape architects, which Antebi describes as TreeTube’s main customers.

In fact, Antebi says, there are more than 1,000 new trees in various parts of the world that are thriving because of the TreeTubes in which they were planted.

Founded in 2019, the company last month was a winner in this year’s MassChallenge Israel Early-Stage Accelerator Program, a four-month intensive course in Jerusalem that helps entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies. 

The five winners were chosen from among the 30 competitors for their ability to present a clear business strategy and their potential to have a positive global impact.

The startup is bootstrapped, with funding coming from the founders themselves. They are currently looking for further investment in order to expand and bring the benefits of urban trees to more locations.

Antebi says that urban life will soon be virtually impossible without trees, making solutions such as TreeTube indispensable as the climate changes and the planet heats up.

“We cannot play this game anymore: the world is in a different situation,” he warns.

“Unless we make a huge change in our cities, [they will be] 4 degrees Celsius higher than today within less than 50 years, we will end up with not enough water and all the seas will rise.” 

The post Tree-Planting Startup Creates Urban Oases In Overheated Cities appeared first on NoCamels.

And while there are a wealth of solutions – some deadly, some mere deterrents – to the issue of moles and similar pests ruining gardens, none are permanent and need constant revisiting as the burrowing animals inevitably return. So much so, that homeowners can begin to feel as though they really are playing an interminable game of Whac-a-Mole. 

Israeli startup Molex, however, really digs into the problem with what it says is a permanent solution in the form of an underground sound system that repels moles and other fossorial animals that burrow and live underground, by imitating their predators while not being a nuisance to humans.  

“The intention is to keep rodents out of human infrastructure and to have them stay in nature safely,” Molex co-founder Ofir Mizrahi tells NoCamels.  “We are protecting the plots without harming the animals.”

And moles, Mizrahi says, are found in every corner of the world – fauna wreaking havoc on flora everywhere they are present. 

 “It’s a global problem,” he explains. “There are very small areas in the world where you don’t have rodents – like certain islands – but it is everywhere.” 

Molex’s electricity-powered disc-shaped device is placed underground in a garden or other outdoors area, from where it emits the sounds that mimic the natural predators of the moles and other fossorial animals – those which burrow and live underground. 

It has to be installed by a technician, who hooks it up to an electrical grid or solar panels to power it. Molex also made sure that it operates on low voltage, to avoid any accidental incidents with electrics in a residential space where children are present. It is also the presence of children that rules out standard pest control solutions such as poison. 

The device, which Mizrahi refers to as an “engine,” is buried to the depth of the tunnels created by the animals, after extensive R&D to find the optimal way to combine reach and efficacy.  

The system works by utilizing the fossorial animals’ method of communication against them, imitating their habit of knocking their heads against their tunnels as a form of echolocation. 

“They just create knocks, and with the sound coming back to them, they know where they are and they know if there is a predator in the area,” Mizrahi explains. 

“We want to create tension so they feel that a specific area is not convenient for them, and then they’re going away.” 

The moles tend not to appear when people are in the area, he says, so the device only needs to be activated via a simple app when the area is deserted. Only when standing directly next to it can the sound be heard, so it does not cause any inconvenience when installed in a residential property. 

The device has a reach of about half an acre – to cover more ground, an additional box would have to be installed. And it is for this reason, Mizrahi says, that the company recently decided to focus on smaller sites such as private gardens and organic greenhouses that do not use chemicals, rather than fields for crops and golf courses, despite the demand from such locations.  

“We realized that it would take time to provide the [device] to large fields,” he explains. “It’s not that our solution would not work, but it would be very expensive.”   

The technology was developed by Mizrahi and co-founder Ram Benderman, a third-generation farmer who grows flowers, after the latter discovered about two years ago that moles were decimating his plants.    

“He started to see mounds, and he started to see the leaves were drying in his fields,” recalls Mizrahi. Benderman turned to advisors from the Ministry of Agriculture who confirmed to him that there were moles in the area. 

The two then started to explore existing options to Benderman’s mole problem but found that none of them were effective long term. 

“It was surprising for us,” Mizrahi says. “We started by ordering all sorts of devices, ultrasonic and several others. Nothing really worked, and then we realized that we needed to come up with a solution.” 

Benderman (the “ideas man,” according to Mizrahi) has vast experience in developing technological devices for the Israeli defense industry. He has spent much of the 10 months since war broke out either inside Gaza or on the northern border with Lebanon, from where Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group has been bombing swathes of the north relentlessly. 

Getting to work on their product, Mizrahi and Benderman started collaborating with other Israeli farmers and the Ministry of Agriculture to refine their R&D. 

“Israel is not our market,” says Mizrahi, referring to the country’s limited size, “but it’s a very good place for us to do our pilots.”  

One of the Israeli farmers they are working with, he says, had moles eating their way through his passion fruit bushes and was forced to divert manpower to deal with them. 

Mizrahi compared this to hunting for landmines, adding that the process reinforced the understanding that none of the solutions on the market were permanent. 

“It’s time and again,” he says, pointing out that pest control services will not give assurances that they can solve the problem for good as they know that they will likely have to return within months. 

The company recently completed MassChallenge Israel’s Early-Stage Accelerator Program, a four-month intensive course in Jerusalem that helps selected entrepreneurs advance their nascent companies. 

“Mass challenge almost saved the business,” Mizhrai says.  “After October 7 we couldn’t do the projects that we had. It was mole season in Israel – we had everything planned for the following week, and we missed it.” 

It was also previously part of the European Union’s EIT Food entrepreneurship program, which supports agritech startups in the food sphere. While Molex was the only Israeli company among the 40-strong cohort, Mizrahi says, it did teach them a great deal about business possibilities in Europe.  

Some of Molex’s funding came from the EU program, and some came from the Agriculture Ministry in Israel, which is keen to end its use of environmentally unfriendly poison as an answer to burrowing animals that are destroying crops.  

The rest of their funds came from their own pockets and from the small number of farmers they are working with in Israel. They were in contract with a leading Israeli irrigation company but that was suspended once war broke out in October. 

Molex is currently searching for a CEO/co-founder to expand the company’s reach abroad, including cooperation with irrigation companies whose subterranean infrastructure is also being devastated by moles and their ilk. 

The company also plans to make the device into a complete kit that anyone can install themselves without input from an expert. And, as a gesture to the moles they so efficiently drive away, even create feeding stations where the banished beasts can recover from their encounter with a pseudo predator. 

The post Sound-Emitting Device Safely Keeps The Moles From The Door appeared first on NoCamels.

So three years ago, the entrepreneurial long-time vegan and activist set out together with the company’s fellow co-founders — 3D printing expert Hila Elimelech, and Oshi’s current innovation lead Ariel Szklanny and director of food R&D Ron Sicsic — to create the world’s first plant-based fish filet with the taste and texture of the original. 

The company, formerly known as Plantish, selected salmon filets as its goal because of the fish’s popularity with consumers, Ron tells NoCamels.

Ron says he realized that there was no fish alternative among the plant-based meat alternatives popping up, largely because the texture and structure of fish differs to that of meat.

Therefore, unlike the relatively straightforward task of creating vegan burgers that mimic ground meat with ingredients like soy or mushrooms, the challenge of imitating the complex structure of fish filets presented a unique obstacle. 

“You can take soy, you can take mushrooms, you can take lentils, mix it together, shape it into a ball, then squeeze it a little bit, put it into the oven and in 20 minutes, you’ll have a great vegan burger,” he says. 

“If you do that, you will not get a fish filet because the texture and the structure is a lot more difficult.”

Fish filets possess intricate layers of flakes and fat lines, each contributing to its unique texture and mouthfeel, Ron explains, and no one in the food tech industry had yet tackled the problem of replicating it with plant-based alternatives. 

It took the Oshi team three years of diligent, expert work on two fronts of research and development to create both the right texture and the right taste for the alternative salmon filet currently being market tested in 15 select restaurants across the USA. 

Their solution lay in mycoprotein, a mycelium-based protein that also provides micronutrients, complemented by algae and vegetable oils. 

This innovative blend not only mirrors the nutritional profile of fish but also replicates its texture through Oshi’s proprietary technology known as modular layering. 

Ron explains that the flakes and the fat of the fish are created using two different methods and then combined in the production process.

The startup’s unique machinery meticulously constructs each filet, layer by layer of flakes and fat, ensuring an authentic fish-like experience.

“We invented machinery that can not only place the flakes one on top of the other, but it is actually shaping each flake into the right shape. It builds the fish like you build with Lego,” Ron says. 

The company is now in the process of refining its product-market fit before expanding into retail sales, he says.

The plant-based filets are a solution for an industry that Ron warns is taking an environmental toll on the marine ecosystem. 

Oceans are being overfished and filled with toxins such as microfibers and mercury, while traditional fish farming practices are unsustainable and even detrimental to human health with the overuse of antibiotics to keep disease at bay. 

Furthermore, he explains, salmon are carnivores and fish farms take fish from the oceans in order to feed them at a pace that is also not sustainable.

“That is the main thing that people should know that when we eat fish, it’s not like we’re eating cucumbers that someone is planting: we are just taking fish, and if we take too much, there are less and less fish each year,” says Ron.

“That’s what has been happening in the past 50 years,“ he says. “We have to stop it. We have to reduce the amount of fish we’re eating in order to make the ocean thrive.”

Backed by $14.5 million in funding from investors and poised for further investment rounds, Oshi has relocated its production facility to California from its initial base in the central Israeli city of Rishon Lezion, which remains as the center of research and development. 

The company was also recently recognized as one of Israel’s top 50 promising startups of the year by Israeli tech website Calcalist, for its pioneering efforts in food tech. 

For now, the cost of the Oshi filet is equivalent to premium salmon filets from the Faroe Islands and Alaska, Ron says, with the price connected to the speed of the company’s production process. 

“The pace of our machinery has not yet reached the pace of the fish farms [which raise] tons of fish at the same time,” he says. 

But as they systematically update and upgrade their machinery, he believes they will reach the optimum price in about three years. 

Rather than trying to recreate other existing kinds of fish, Ron says Oshi’s next goal is to create a new “species” of plant-based fish. 

This, the company maintains, will appeal not only to the environmentally aware consumer, but also those who like to try something completely new rather than something that merely imitates an existing product. 

“We are putting all our efforts into making it the healthiest and tastiest without trying to mimic a specific taste,” he says. 

“We believe that if we stay with just mimicking, it will be hard to penetrate to the mainstream.”

A board member of Israeli non-profit Vegan Friendly, which promotes a lifestyle free of all animal products, Ron stresses the importance of creating startups that benefit the world, be it related to health, ecology or other fields with real meaning, which can really do good. 

“I am spending my life trying to be an advocate for animals and sustainability, and for me it is a privilege to be making this ideology my full-time job,” he says. 

“I have built a few ventures before, but Oshi is the most exciting for me because it aligns with my passion and can also have a massive impact.”

The post Salmon Alternative Looks & Tastes Like Real Thing, Down To The Last Flake appeared first on NoCamels.

Capital Nature CEO Ofir Gomeh predicts the entire global economy will undergo a dramatic transformation in the coming years, shifting towards decarbonization and decarbonized industries, with business opportunities as a driving motivator. 

“It’s a huge technological opportunity, a huge economic opportunity,” he tells NoCamels. “It’s the only way to save the world, so in that sense, climate [tech] will be everywhere, and therefore we will.”

Originally created as an incubator for very young startups in the climate ecosystem, in recent years Capital Nature has evolved into an investment fund, with a focus on decarbonization. 

This means reducing the use of fossil fuels like coal and oil that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it traps heat from the sun and causes the planet to heat up, and also reducing the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere. 

Technologies advancing decarbonization tend to center on carbon-free and renewable sources of energy such as wind, hydro and solar, and reducing gas-powered vehicles in favor of electric models.  

Capital Nature was founded in 2012, and Investment Manager Orelle Khalili says the fund sees many aspects of modern technology as having the potential to help deal with climate change. 

“Today, we’re not necessarily just focusing on mobility and energy, but really on anything and everything that could be considered climate [related],” Khalili explains. 

“We believe that that is what it is evolving into,” she says. “It’s shaping the technology that we use in our daily life in every sense of the word.”  

According to Khalili, because of the small size of the country and the limited number of companies actually actively working on climate change solutions, investors in Israel must look beyond the scope of the climate ecosystem in Israel. 

She gives the example of Copprint, one of the startups in the fund’s portfolio, which had an environmental factor without even realizing. The Jerusalem-based startup uses copper ink to print electronics instead of the industry standard of silver, whose mining causes considerable environmental damage. 

“They weren’t even aware that by producing these inks, they are significantly reducing a lot of toxic waste, a lot of silver mining,” says Khalili. 

“[It’s] not necessarily within the scope of the usual climate suspects that VCs here are looking for, but [they’re] actually having a significant impact.” 

The portfolio currently includes 15 startups at various stages of development and covering a gamut of the environmental ecosystem, from innovative battery designs to reducing food waste. 

But, says Gomeh, the fund does tend to “shy away” from the agriculture and food sectors, not because they are any less crucial to mitigating the impact of climate change, but rather because they require specialized knowledge.  

“We find the other things we do are [varied] enough for us to focus on,” he says.  

Trucknet, another of the startups in the Capital Nature portfolio, is an example of coupling profitability with environmental responsibility. 

The company has developed a way for transportation providers to ensure that their vehicles do not make any journeys without a full complement of cargo, by selling spaces in the trucks and vans to different companies. 

This not only reduces transportation costs for all involved as they share the expense, but also cuts the number of vehicles on the road, thereby causing less carbon emissions. 

“They built the marketplace,” Gomeh says of the Eilat-based Trucknet, which also has offices in France, Romania and Spain. 

“They’re the owners of the marketplace, and then cargo owners and truckers come in and do whatever they need to do in order for trucks to go,” he says.  

Perhaps surprisingly, the fund’s shareholders include Israeli defense technology behemoths Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, but Gomeh points out that these companies are also interested in developing greentech such as sustainable aviation fuel for fighter jets. 

“Why would the army care if an F-16 flies on regular aviation fuel or sustainable fuel?” he says. “Well, it does matter and they do care.”  

Furthermore, technology developed for the military often finds its way into the civilian world, such as unmanned aerial vehicles like drones, which Amazon intends to bring into widespread use for deliveries.

And, he explains, the smaller batteries and other lightweight components developed for the military drones will also find their way into private electric vehicles.  

Ultimately, Gomeh says it is possible to draw a straight line between the massive investments being made in defense technology and tomorrow’s climate ecosystem. 

“We’re trying to be there and situate ourselves at this intersection,” he says, “so we are able to deploy defense technology into climate, and help it grow as much as we can.” 

The post Climate Tech Fund Sees Saving The Planet As Just Good Business appeared first on NoCamels.

In the fast-evolving field of renewable energy, GiraSol says, the Israeli solar ecosystem doesn’t just need new technologies—it needs a partner that can bring the best technologies from around the world to the spots where they are needed most, something it would not necessarily be able to do alone. 

And that is where GiraSol comes in, harnessing high-quality services and products from multiple countries, among them Spanish performance management, Belgian drone-based data analysis and German efficiency enhancement. 

By partnering with global leaders in solar technology, GiraSol says it is ensuring that Israeli solar farms can utilize the latest advancements in monitoring, cabling, and efficiency solutions. 

This not only enhances the performance and reliability of the solar farms but also makes it feasible for new projects to enter the market, overcoming technological and financial barriers that would otherwise limit their development.

In 2020, Israel set itself the target of having 30 percent of its electricity generated from renewable sources within a decade, the International Trade Administration says. And solar was to account for approximately nine-tenths of that 30 percent.

New technologies are crucial for enhancing the efficiency and performance of solar farms. According to the International Energy Agency, solar power has become the cheapest source of electricity in history, thanks to advancements in technology. And, the World Economic Forum says, innovations such as advanced monitoring systems enable solar projects to generate more power and operate more efficiently, even in challenging environments​.

GiraSol, which is based in the central Israel town of Matan, offers a holistic service at many of the nation’s solar panel sites, including supply, installation and servicing for the solutions that they offer, some even for the entire lifespan of the technology, CEO and founder Yoni Ben Mazia tells NoCamels.

The professional support from GiraSol’s team spans from initial project planning through implementation and ongoing monitoring. And with extensive knowledge of the laws and regulations for solar energy in Israel, the company also ensures that all projects comply with standards of the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure and the Electricity Authority.  

Ben Mazia says that companies such as Sitemark in Belgium, GreenPowerMonitor in Spain and Padcon in Germany offer vital services that are simply not available in Israel. What is more, all of the international technologies that GiraSol supplies have only entered the Israel market by working with the company. 

Sitemark, for example, uses software and analysis of drone footage to identify specific performance issues with the site that the on-site monitoring system may not notice.

“With Sitemark’s thermal drone imaging, it was really innovative to use this kind of technology and detect more anomalies and defaults in PV modules through these scans,” Ben Mazia says. 

“With monitoring systems, you can see a lot of data and you can analyze a lot of things on site, on the operational side of the PV site, but there are some things that you cannot see.” 

Similarly, GreenPowerMonitor systems help solar farms track and manage their performance, using advanced software to collect real-time data from equipment on site that assess how well a site is working and quickly identify any problems.  

Padcon, meanwhile, offers a solution to Potential Induced Degradation (PID), a common problem for Israeli solar farms that occurs when electrical currents between the solar panel and its frame cause efficiency to drop over time. 

While this can be due to high voltage, two challenges of the Israeli climate – heat and humidity – also cause a buildup of charges that degrade the materials in the solar panel, reducing its ability to generate electricity.

The common occurrence of this issue in Israel meant it was important to GiraSol that it provide a solution for its clients. 

“Israel is a classic case [for PID],” Ben Mazia says. “We got a solution from Padcon, which was very helpful.” 

Founded in 2019, GiraSol is currently working with more than 100 PV sites across Israel, primary solar farms producing more than 2 megawatts at a time. 

Its major clients include Energix, a leading Israeli independent power producer (IPP) with a significant presence in the US market as well, and EDF (Électricité de France) a French electric utility company that owns and operates large-scale solar farms in Israel.

Along with the advanced monitoring and efficiency technologies, GiraSol also provides solutions such as mobile robots for cleaning solar systems, provided by SolarCleano in Luxembourg, and environmentally friendly panel cleaning additives from Chemitek Solar in Portugal.  

While the company plans to keep supporting Israeli solar companies operating abroad, it sees its future in the partnerships with international companies that can bring more solutions to the Israeli market, making the energy producers more automated and more efficient. 

“My vision on a large utility scale [is to provide] several technologies which are operating the sites almost autonomously,” Ben Mazia says.

The post Startup Transforming Israel’s Solar Ecosystem Into A Global Affair   appeared first on NoCamels.

Fabumin makes its egg substitute at legume processing factories, using wastewater known as aquafaba. This wastewater, the company’s CEO and co-founder Adi Yehezkeli tells NoCamels, amounts to millions of cubic meters that would otherwise go down the drain.

The aquafaba is distilled into a mud-like substance that is then dried into a powder for use in the food industry. And that powder, Yehezkeli says, even foams, binds and emulsifies better than the original eggs themselves. 

The process for creating the powder is done on-site at the legume plants, she explains. The plant operator acquires the technology from Faubmin and installs it in the pots used to cook the legumes. 

Not only does the Fabumin proprietary technology extract the “mud” from the wastewater but it also purifies the cooking water as it does so, recycling the vast majority of it and returning it to the plant at no charge. 

“The first part of the technology is evaporation,” Yehezkeli says. “We evaporate 80 percent of the wastewater, cool the steam and return the water to the factory as distilled water for free for reuse.”

The remaining 20 percent becomes the mud, which Yehekzeli likens to tomato puree. The mud is also dried and powdered at the plant and then sold to Fabumin’s clients, almost exclusively  in the food industry. 

In fact, Yehekzeli says, Fabumin’s international patent covers four-fifths of the global market and the technology has already attracted interest from some of the world’s biggest food conglomerates. 

“We have traction [with] 15 different companies,” she says. “Food companies like Grupo Bimbo, Haagen Daaz, CSM – they’re all testing our powder.” 

There is no difference in taste or texture between the foods made with real egg and those made from the powder, Yehezkeli insists. In a blind test, she says, people were unable to tell the difference between the two. 

The company is also working on a scheme to create an actual eggshell, to create the actual impression of a real egg. 

“It’s a whole plant-based egg,” says Yehezkeli. “You can actually take your egg and crack it into a pan.”  

The Tel Aviv-based company, which was created in 2020, is also about to sign its first agreement with a legume factory in Europe to use its dried wastewater to create the egg alternative. 

Yehezkeli says that although the aquafaba is a vegan-friendly egg alternative, the Fabumin product is aimed at the entire food industry, and not just those who refrain from consuming dairy. 

“We’re not aiming for the vegan market,” she says. “It’s too small and it’s crowded.”  

Instead, the objective is to help food manufacturers to replace the egg components within all of their original recipes, something which Yehezkeli argues has several advantages. 

Firstly, she says, egg production lines are always in jeopardy of contamination from salmonella found in the bird feces that sometimes remains on egg shells after washing. 

The US Centers for Disease Control actually estimates that 1 out of every 20,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella  which can cause diarrhea, abdominal pain and vomiting. And with an estimated 1 trillion eggs laid every year, that is no small number. 

Salmonella contamination can be disastrous for food companies, triggering costly recalls and decontamination processes as well as harming public trust in their products. 

Yehezkeli gives the example of Israel’s top chocolate maker Elite, which in early 2022 recalled its entire confectionary line after salmonella was detected at its factory in the north of Israel. It took months before Elite confectionary was reintroduced to Israeli stores. 

Alongside salmonella, Yehezkeli says the egg industry is also directly impacted by diseases like avian flu and by conflicts, highlighting the ongoing shelling by Lebanese terror group Hezbollah has put an end to egg production in parts of northern Israel. 

Both of these factors have caused the price of eggs to rise both for the food production companies and, ultimately, the consumer. 

“We can save the food manufacturers money, because they can replace [real egg] with our product, which has a stable price,” she says. 

In fact, Yehezkeli points out, food production companies already use egg powder in most of their goods, including cakes and other sweet treats, and increasing the proportion will only make the products cheaper and more appealing to consumers who would otherwise be deterred by the egg content. 

“This is what we are doing,” she says. “We are helping them to change to our raw material, [so] that they can reduce the cost of their ingredients and also address new markets for people who are allergic to eggs.”  

Fabumin has received significant support from the Cartier Women’s Initiative (CWI), an international program dedicated to empowering women entrepreneurs. 

The support came in the shape of a $30,000 grant, a stand at the largest tech exhibition in Paris for two years, mentorship and the chance to pitch the company to hundreds of people. 

And Fabumin even credits CWI with helping to reach its first agreement with the legume factory in Europe. 

“We have excellent networking in Europe, where we will start our first international phase,” Yehezkeli says.

Fabumin was part of an innovation lab opened in Israel by New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), which sells food, scents and more around the world. And, Yehezkeli says, through IFF the company received funding from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to advancing the national high-tech sector. 

Funding from the IIA has allowed the company to create what a pilot to produce kilos of the egg alternative powder.  

Yehezkeli says that while aquafaba was not unknown as an egg substitute in the vegan world, making into a powder for mass food production is what sets Fabumin apart from other companies.

“We’re enabling industrial use with a long shelf life, small storage and there is no problem working with it,” she says. “This is our vision.”

The post No Yolk: Egg Alternative Made From Aquafaba Tastes Like Real Thing appeared first on NoCamels.

The new app developed by the Agriot Group uses artificial intelligence to determine how much fertilizer a plant needs, just by looking at its picture. 

Sounds far-fetched, but Croptune has found a way to determine the nitrogen content in a plant from an image – and from there judge how much nitrogen-rich fertilizer it needs. All that is required is the Croptune app downloaded on a regular Apple or Android smartphone. 

Plants need nitrogen to grow as it forms a key component of both amino acids (the building blocks of protein) and of chlorophyll, the compound that converts light into energy in plants and which gives them their green hue. 

And it is the color of the leaves that allows the Croptune app to assess the amount of nitrogen within them. From there it can extrapolate just how much nitrate (the mineral converted from nitrogen gas by bacteria in the soil) is present in the ground. 

“We take a picture of the plant, and by analyzing the color and the texture of the picture that we get with a regular smartphone with a deep learning machine, we can say the percentage of nitrogen in the leaves,” Agriot CEO Mark Fishman tells NoCamels. 

“According to how green it is, I can tell you how much nitrogen it has.” 

He qualifies that each plant is different in both appearance and fertilizer requirements, so it is crucial to have a thorough understanding of the location and age of the plant in order to have a true snapshot of the needs of the field and provide the correct recommendations. 

For although nitrogen makes up just over three quarters of the air that we breathe, plants cannot absorb it in this way and instead rely on nitrates in the soil to give them the nutrients that they need. Most fertilizers contain between 26 to 32 percent nitrogen. 

According to Fishman, the Croptune solution to determining nitrogen content in the soil is a revolution as it removes the need for the customary lengthy and complex process involved in understanding how much of it leaves contain. 

“Usually people take the leaves first to a laboratory [where they have to] keep them cool,” he explains, pointing out that not every agriculturalist has access to such a facility. 

“Then they crush and dry the leaves, do a chemical analysis, and two to three weeks later, you get the results that tell you the percentage of nitrogen in the leaf,” he says. 

Croptune, on the other hand, not only gives results of the nitrogen content in the plant in real time, Fishman says, but also provides a recommendation of how much fertilizer to use based on those results, a process that boosts crop yields as well. 

“We know the age of the plant, the age of the field and the percentage of nitrogen and can tell you that you really need to boost the fertilizer because there is a lack of fertilizers or offer support to keep on doing what you’re doing,” he says. 

“Vice versa, we say if you’re giving too much fertilizer and you should stop, you have enough.”

It is vital to understand just how much fertilizer crops need because of the consequences of too much nitrogen in the soil, Fishman says.

Too little fertilizer will deprive the crops of vital nutrients and hamper both growth and harvest, while too much – aside from the wasted expense – leaves nitrogen in the soil unabsorbed by the plants, which brings its own environmental dangers both for the climate and the soil and the groundwater underneath. 

“This is a critical point,” Fishman says. “Some of this [surplus] nitrogen turns into very polluting greenhouse gas and the other part goes as nitrate to the groundwater and pollutes it.” 

And nitrate, he warns, is the number one pollutant of groundwater. 

Founded in 2017, Agriot is an offshoot of the Haifa Group, a world-leading provider of specialty fertilizers. Named for the northern Israeli city in which it was established and is still based some 55 years later, the company has 17 subsidiaries operating in more than 100 countries worldwide, including China, South Africa and Turkey. 

The technology used by Croptune was the work of Prof. Jiftah Ben Asher, Agriot’s late CTO and an internationally respected agronomist who died aged 85 during the Hamas mass terror attack in southern Israel on October 7. 

“When he started to get WhatsApp messages with the names of all his friends from the area under attack, he said he needed to rest and he never woke up,” Fishman says. “He is not a casualty of the war, but he is.” 

The company initially received funding from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government devoted to advancing the national high-sector sector, as well as private investment. Today, it has some 5,000 subscribers all over the world, according to Fishman, and is available in seven different languages. 

He says that while Croptune is currently only certified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to analyze potato plants, in actuality it can identify nitrogen levels in 21 different crops, including three grown in greenhouses, and the company is planning to expand its certification range. 

For Fishman, a key driver behind the creation of the app is helping farmers, whom he says are often exploited at the hands of other elements within the agriculture supply chains.  

“Farmers are always in survival mode,” he says. “We look at farmers as our partners so we need to help them, not gain on their backs.” 

The post Green Gauge: App Analyzes Leaf Color To Understand Crops’ Needs appeared first on NoCamels.

The tricky issue of maintaining and monitoring the photovoltaic (PV) cells that make up the solar panels – especially on rooftops or in remote solar farms – is crucial to their efficiency and efficacy.  

And Israeli startup Soltell Systems is on a mission to provide clarity for all solar panel operators in order to understand how well their PV cells are really working. 

The Herzliya-based startup’s energy management software helps rooftop solar providers in residential, commercial and industrial areas monitor, manage and improve their panels’ performance – removing what it says is widespread guesswork about when they need to be cleaned and serviced, and potentially saving them time and money.

“When we monitored solar plants, looked at their real performance, essentially we saw that in reality many of the plant owners, operators or developers don’t know the true performance of their plants,” Soltell founder and CEO Leon Kraversky tells No Camels.

“Knowing the true performance is very important, but the accuracy of their performance assessment is low.” 

In fact, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research shows that dust gathering on solar panels can drastically reduce their output in a single month, and the researchers say that even a 3 to 4 percent reduction in solar power worldwide could lead to losses of up to $5.5 billion.  

Soltell’s SysMap platform uses advanced software to give precise reports on how solar panels are working without adding specialized sensors to them. Instead, it makes use of local open-source weather sensors – data-collection devices whose design and software are freely shared for anyone to use for or adapt to their own needs.

The platform uses the electrical sensors in the area of the panels to gauge exactly when the panels need to be cleaned, monitoring the local weather conditions and the solar power generated to compile a clear understanding of the PV performance.  

“We can measure soiling [build up] on solar panels remotely, without installing any add-on hardware,” Kraversky says. 

“So we can say for example this plant on that rooftop has a 7-percent reduction because of soiling, [mainly caused by] dust.”

The company says SysMap is extremely accurate, reducing solar panels’  maintenance downtime by up to 65 percent and costs by up to 40 percent.

According to Kraversky, most companies do not understand how much of an adverse effect buildup creates in terms of panel performance or when to take action to remove it – itself a costly procedure. 

“Our solution can say with more than 95 percent accuracy what the exact reduction in panel performance is,” he says. 

“Then you can know when to treat the problem: if it’s a 5-percent reduction, that does not justify having the panels cleaned, but if it’s 15 percent then you should do something about it.”

In Israel alone, solar panel cleaning costs up to 300 shekels ($80) per cell, while the average business worldwide has around 70 cells in its plant. And Kraversky says most companies have their panels cleaned and serviced every three months. 

Founded in 2019, Soltell originally developed a full SaaS (Software as a Service) solution with their own dedicated website for solar panel managers to monitor their sites. 

Over the past 12 months, however, the company has pivoted and now offers a strictly data-sharing service through an API (digital “bridge” between two different pieces of software) that can be integrated into the interface already in use at the solar panel site. 

Once Soltell has collected and analyzed the data at a particular site using the open source sensors and its proprietary algorithms, it sends it directly to a client’s own solar panel monitoring software. 

“The API just provides data without visuals for the end user,” Kraversky explains. 

“Clients are using [their own] energy management systems, so they already have their own visual user experience/user interface and don’t need somebody else to provide them with the visuals.” 

SysMap’s predictive capabilities also allow Soltell to determine how well these systems will continue to work. By understanding current performance, they can predict future functioning, which is valuable for the fiscal side of a business, making it easier to optimize investments and manage financial plans effectively.

The software can be accessed via an annual or monthly subscription, priced according to the amount of data used.  

Soltell’s solution is already gaining popularity in EU member states, with clients in Austria, the Baltic countries, Italy and Poland. 

According to the European Commission, solar power is growing faster than any other energy source in the European Union due to its cheap, clean and flexible nature.  

The EU has a strong focus on placing solar panels on rooftops in both residential and commercial areas under its plan to boost these locations as generators of clean energy. 

As part of updated EU regulations, new buildings in its member states must be able to take solar panels. Existing public buildings will have solar panels added gradually from 2027, where technically and economically feasible.

Soltell is also making its mark in Israel, where there are some 300 days of sunshine each year and renewable energy accounted for around 12 percent of total power usage in 2022. It has clients across the country, including residential building complexes, commercial buildings, factories and farms. 

The company has also received two research and innovation grants from the Israel Innovation Authority and was accepted into the NVIDIA Inception program for startups at the end of 2023. 

This program allows Soltell to use the advanced AI and data science tools of the US tech giant, which has a significant research lab in Israel, to improve the efficiency of solar energy systems. 

The program also offers training and collaboration opportunities with industry experts, helping Soltell to further innovate in solar analytics and performance prediction.

While currently making its biggest mark in Europe, Soltell is also a member of the American Orange Button Initiative, which the US Department of Energy says is designed to make solar energy projects cheaper and more streamlined by standardizing the collection and dissemination of data. 

Furthermore, Kraversky says, the company is part of the Orange Button working group, allowing it to not only implement the standardization but also contribute to the development of those standards. 

Soltell foresees decentralized panels (smaller PV systems not connected to a central grid) such as used by private companies and individual households as the future of solar energy, which it believes creates a more stable and sustainable environment. 

Indeed, the company plans to focus on its expansion in developed countries that tend to have more decentralized energy systems. This, Soltell maintains, democratizes energy production and makes it more accessible for all.

“We like decentralization, and decentralization works in developed countries,” Kraversky explains, adding that OECD countries largely have decentralized systems.  

“And that makes a lot of sense,” he says. “It’s much more logical to build energy generation [sites] close to the place where you consume it.” 

The post Software & Sensors Keep Solar Panels At Peak Performance appeared first on NoCamels.

The company launched its data-driven autonomous (self-driving) tractor four years ago, and, according to Bluewhite Vice President for Production and Testing Amir Peleg, it has a significant role to play in feeding the global population. 

“When you look at everything we are facing in agriculture today – we are talking about labor shortages, buying challenges and costs, operational costs—sustainability needs to be accelerated so that around all that we can have enough food to feed the [growing] population,” Peleg tells NoCamels. 

“It is a challenge. I think we are already contributing to the solution and we’re going to be a very big and important player in this game. I want to solve this issue.”

Bluewhite’s flagship product, the Pathfinder, offers a seamless transition to autonomous farming, retrofitting existing ordinary tractors with state-of-the-art technology and transforming them into smart, efficient machines. 

Coupled with the Compass, a proprietary comprehensive software application, growers gain real-time insights and control over their fleet monitoring operations, optimizing routes and making data-driven decisions all from the palm of their hand – boosting productivity and minimizing downtime. 

This combined technology offers up to an 85-percent saving for the grower by reducing operational and labor expenses while increasing yield, says Peleg. 

Importantly, he points out, the technology does not take jobs away from workers, because the labor shortage in this area has been a worldwide issue for some 15 years now. 

Directed by a worker using the Compass software, the Pathfinder can perform the five or six different jobs – such as spraying and mowing – that constitute 80 to 95 percent of the work required by the growers, Peleg explains. 

“But we are doing much more than that,” he states. 

Bluewhite currently has 100 operational Pathfinders in the field, and has been working operationally for almost the last four years in California’s Central Valley area with a pioneering group of 20 leading permanent crop farmers. 

Permanent row crops don’t need to be cut down during the harvest and replanted at the beginning of every growing season, and include citrus, vineyards and berries, as well as hops for brewing beer. 

And as far as Bluewhite is aware, it is the only company in the world that is currently operational with paying customers who are using autonomous tractors.

The startup was founded in 2017 by veterans of the Israel Air Force and the world of autonomous technology. Today, Bluewhite has gone global, with US-based headquarters in Fresno, California and backing from leading venture capital funders.

Initially, the Bluewhite founders began investigating the urban autonomous mobility field, but soon understood that it would take another 20 or 30 years until city self-driving technology was fully implementable, says Peleg. 

The company quickly realized the potential of applying its expertise to farming, where it could have a quick and meaningful impact, in particular when it comes to global food security.

“We found that agriculture was the perfect venue to take our knowledge and experience,” Peleg says. 

“We understood part of the issues and problems and challenges [facing] growers around the world,” he says. “We understood that our solution can bring great value for them.”

These changes in agriculture have become a big challenge for growers and a real opportunity for companies that can bring the technical solutions, says Peleg. Indeed, the global market for autonomous tractors is due to hit $11.5 billion by 2030. 

In January, Bluewhite announced that it had secured $39 million in Series C financing led by Insight Partners, with participation from new investors Alumni Ventures and LIP Ventures, among others. Existing investors Entrée Capital, Jesselson, and Peregrine Ventures also participated. 

The funds will be used to further scale its autonomous tractor and farming solutions, and expand into new markets worldwide based on its successful track record, it said.

According to Peleg, scalability, safety and sustainability lies at the core of the innovation. 

The autonomous technology is flexible, he says, helping with labor shortages issues affecting farmers worldwide, the growing concerns for safety issues and lessening human contact with chemicals, and increased production rates.

“We’re doing retrofits for existing tractors so we don’t need to wait for new tractors. We don’t need farmers to pay a lot of money. We just take whatever [equipment] they have, and make it a user-friendly customer robot. You allow the grower to increase his productivity very quickly and reduce his costs, so they see a return on their investment really, really fast,” Peleg explains. 

Even the original equipment manufacturers are telling growers that there is no way back from the autonomous world, he states. 

Indeed, today Bluewhite works with most of the large original equipment manufacturers (known as OEMS) including CNH Industrial, training dealers to install their after-market retrofit kits, transforming a regular tractor into an autonomous vehicle. 

To date, Bluewhite has enabled autonomous farming across 150,000 acres of farmland in the US alone, and has executed more than 50,000 operational hours, Peleg explains. 

“We are seeing customers operating the farm alone without us, or just with one person. So it’s really going back to the zero-touch base, where we don’t need to be around anymore,” he says. 

“Our solution combines real agriculture with the highest level of technology. It shows that you can really combine them with something not super sophisticated; though the capabilities are super-sophisticated, operating it is not.”

After the tractor has been retrofitted with its kit, Bluewhite provides support but the grower is quickly able to learn how to operate it alone. 

Peleg also credits the farmers they worked for helping the company to implement their autonomous technology swiftly and efficiently.

“You have to start with the right customers and California farmers and growers are one of the toughest in the world,” he says, adding that they don’t hesitate to speak their mind and give input about their needs and what works and what doesn’t work. 

“We have been working with colleagues in the field on the farm for a long time and we know their requirements, their demands, their problems, and their challenges,” Peleg says. 

“We’re not developing our product only in the lab,” he says. “We went to work with customers. The most experienced farmers always wanted to work with us… they understand the future.”

One especially optimistic—and unexpected—outcome of the cooperative efforts has been that now farmers’ sons and daughters have begun to show interest in remaining in agriculture. 

“They started talking about the tech or the startups, and are seeing that their parents are building 21st century autonomous farms—suddenly you have robots in your backyard and you’re becoming something very high-tech. So, the next generation, which ran away from agriculture, is talking about doing it together,” Peleg says. 

“It’s a new way of talking about it.”

The post Turning Tractors Into Self-Driving Machines To Help Feed The World appeared first on NoCamels.

Sowillo Energy, based in the community town of Mikhmanim in northern Israel, has developed a system to use energy from the hot water wasted when we bathe or even when we wash the dishes or our clothes.

When a person takes a shower and the hot water goes down the drain, the Sowillo system catches it before it enters the municipal sewer system, directing it instead to a proprietary tank that contains a special coil. 

The excess hot water heats up the coil, which in turn is then used to create more hot water for the building.

“The vast majority of the heat [from water], around 80 or 90 percent, is wasted in the drainage systems,” Sowillo COO Maxim Goldshtein tells No Camels. The company, he explains, is simply collecting and using that heat in an effective way. 

Heating water is costly in terms of both price and impact on the environment. According to the United States’ Natural Resources Defense Council, hot water for homes and commercial buildings in the US alone generates 520 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually. This is comparable to the emissions from 113 million cars each year.

In fact, Goldshtein says, the Sowillo system is more efficient than traditional heating systems, which require far more kilowatts to heat the same amount of water as the startup. 

“For each kilowatt of energy, we are actually getting 5.2 kilowatts of heat,” he explains. This is because the Sowillo system is not creating new heat, but rather transferring existing heat from one place to another. 

The technology is flexible, allowing Sowillo to connect to existing gas or electricity heating systems, without having to dismantle or replace them, but can also be introduced as the sole water heater.  

The company also created accompanying artificial intelligence that studies a location’s patterns of hot water usage via the boiler – should the system be connected to one. 

It then seeks to reduce the cost of heating water such as only using the boiler when electricity tariffs are at their cheapest (for example during daytime hours) or by using the peak shaving technique. 

Peak shaving aims to reduce electricity bills, whose prices are set by what are determined to be peak levels of consumption. To reduce the peak, a business or even a household will spread their electricity consumption over a longer period, thereby reducing the highest amount used at any given time – and the prices they pay. 

“The system operates autonomously and [makes] models in a learning algorithm to make it more aligned with the user,” Goldshtein explains.

It can even know when a family is on vacation, he says, negating the need to heat the water in advance. 

The AI also monitors any existing hot water systems for potential malfunctions. And, should the Sowillo system underperform, it will automatically revert back to the original boiler alone. 

The technology can be used with water from showers, dishwashers, washing machines and even toilets. 

To uphold global standards for water safety, the system involves two walls of separation between sewage water and clean water, meaning there is no possible contamination of clean water sources – even by graywater. 

Founded in 2013, Sowillo – whose name derives from the ancient rune for “sun” – began by creating software to efficiently manage hot water systems through Internet of Things technology (attaching online capabilities to everyday objects so that they can be controlled via computers). 

The company then developed the technology for heating water, which currently caters primarily to institutions with high usage of hot water, such as hotels, laundromats and hospitals. 

“These kinds of businesses have really significant expenses for water heating, and for us, this is where we began to enter the market,” Goldshtein says. 

Since 2016, the company has received over $1 million in funding. Most recently, it was awarded 1 million shekels by Israel’s Ministry of Energy late last year, and is now looking for an investor to match that sum.

Sowillo’s clients include Kfar Maccabiah Hotel near Tel Aviv, which every four years hosts the Maccabiah Games (aka “the Jewish Olympics”), as well as a major Israeli organization that is spread across multiple sites. 

The system can cater to residential buildings but only for up to 30 apartments. Beyond that, more systems must be installed to cope with the increased demand. Each system is currently available as a one-off purchase with no further costs. 

In the future, Sowillo does envision moving more into the residential sector – making hot water into a service that removes the guesswork from heating costs by ending random pricing. 

“We aim to be a hot water provider,” says Goldshtein. 

“We want to provide our system and provide the maintenance [so that] the customer will only pay for the hot water that he consumes. We see the future as a service.”  

The post Shower Power: Making Wasted Hot Water A Smart Source Of Energy appeared first on NoCamels.

While some of those farmers will still be using the wasteful process of broadcast spraying of pesticides to stamp out weeds, several dozens of others have made the transition to the artificial intelligence and deep learning technology of the Israeli-developed Greeneye Technology precision spraying system, which allows them to use less herbicide by precisely targeting weeds. 

Now in its third upgraded generation, the precision spraying system has already saved its customers an average of 88% on the cost of herbicides, Nadav Bocher, CEO and co-founder of Greeneye Technology, tells NoCamels. 

The use of herbicides, he notes, is one of the greatest threats for crop production globally. 

But yet currently the most common way of dealing with weeds is to blanket-spray herbicides throughout the entire field, several times per season, year after year, even though the actual weed infestation may be as low as 10 percent.

“What our technology enables is for farmers to be very, very precise and spray only the weeds,” says Bocher. 

“It’s a challenging situation to be a corn or soybean farmer and being able to save such a magnitude of chemicals…creates multiple benefits.”

By reducing the amount of chemical herbicides farmers use, he explains, the system also has a significant environmental and health impact in addition to the financial savings to the farmers who are struggling to remain profitable. 

According to Greeneye, farmers spend more than $30 billion on herbicides each year—with the on-line farm journal Ag Web predicting that the cost of herbicides could climb up to $100 per acre in the next year—and many weeds have developed a resistance to herbicides as a result of broadcast spraying which can lead to a global epidemic and create a real threat to food production. 

In addition, the millions of unneeded gallons of herbicides sprayed every year cause severe soil and water contamination and exposes both consumers and farmers to health risks. 

The Greeneye precision spraying system, which can be retrofitted on any brand sprayer machinery already owned by farmers, allows for the green precision technology to be used in real-time field decision making. 

It is currently being used by farmers with mid-to-large sized operations across seven Midwest states including Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma, says Bocher. 

The system differentiates weeds from crops, spraying only the weeds and reducing the usage of herbicides by up to 90 percent, he says, identifying weeds down to the species level to fight herbicide resistance weeds. It can also apply precision spraying on pre-planting and post-harvest spraying applications. 

Initially farmers have been “excited” with the new system, which Greeneye introduced into the market in 2022 following five years of intensive development, but with the natural built-in skepticism involved in bringing innovative product technology to market, they needed to see that the system actually worked, says Bocher.

“Just seeing with their own eyes that it actually works built the conviction,” he says. 

“Once [the farmer] sees it, it’s kind of a no-brainer because the financial benefits are so, so significant. Our interaction is with very innovative farmers who are adopting technology on a regular basis, farmers who keep trying to push the boundary of the yield they can get out of their farm. They are very intelligent customers who understand technology.”

This was precisely the focus market Bocher and his two co-founders—CPO Dr. Itzhak Khait and CTO Alon Klein Orbach—had in mind in 2017 when they set out to reduce chemical usage while increasing productivity and profitability for farmers. With their combined backgrounds in plant science and AI data they knew they wanted to make a significant impact in the agriculture arena, says Bocher. 

To date they have raised $40 million for their venture from a combination of financial investors such as JVP and strategic investors like the leading agrichemical company Syngenta, he says. 

“Agrichemical companies have come to the basic understanding that this [new green tech] is disrupting their business in a way that is inevitable at this point so they may as well figure out a solution to modify their business,” he says. 

“Obviously they would prefer us not to exist, but they understand that this technology is coming and it is changing and they need to adjust accordingly to remain relevant.”

At the moment TeL Aviv-based Greeneye Technology is concentrating on using the core technology it developed for the first commercial application in the Midwest. 

But, says Bocher, it can be used outside of herbicides in the future, such as for detecting diseases, warding off insects and providing proper plant nutrition.  

He says that the problem the company is solving isn’t unique to American corn and soybean farmers, explaining that every farmer around the globe sprays in the same wasteful way, regardless of whether they grow tomatoes, corn or broccoli. 

“The core technology we developed is the ability to see what happens in the field and to make real time decisions,” he says. 

“So there is definitely endless potential with expanding to other markets globally and other crops in addition to expanding the technology to other uses other than chemicals.”  

The post AI Precision Weed Treatment Means Less Herbicide For More Results appeared first on NoCamels.

Today’s energy companies must first scout and secure a location for their solar, wind or agrivoltaic (farming and solar) projects, navigating a maze of negotiations, bureaucracy and local interests. 

Only once this has been completed can they embark on the lengthy procedure of officially verifying the location’s suitability – a slightly retrogressive path, requiring a massive upfront commitment before getting a green light. 

Israeli startup REplace (a portmanteau of Renewable Energy Place) flips the switch on this laborious and costly process by enabling companies to identify an optimal location before any other step is taken, making it possible to launch their projects almost immediately. 

“It takes on average for a country like the United States around 40 years for a project to get all the permits,” REplace CEO Matias Sigal tells NoCamels. 

“In 2023, more than $600 billion was invested in renewable energy projects, and 80% of these projects fail,” he says. 

Aside from the massive amount of dollars lost annually, the current regulatory landscape is greatly slowing down the energy transition. 

According to the Sustainable Review, regulatory hurdles such as complex permit processes and inconsistent policy standards can cause significant roadblocks in the adoption of renewable energy. 

Some locations such as California have over three million parcels of land to vet. Even using advanced Geographic Information System (GIS) technology to interpret the data, it takes companies 20-30 minutes per parcel – meaning it would take more than a century and a half to inspect all of the plots. 

Complications involving land ownership, landscape and permits or infrastructure challenges such as underground gas pipes can also create quite a bottleneck in the process.

But REplace uses its own proprietary algorithms together with public data to check parcels of land according to key parameters, identifying and obtaining the most suitable spots for their customers. 

The energy companies just have to specify three things to REplace: type of project, capacity and desired region. 

“We built an algorithm that analyzes the parameters of data on every single parcel of land according to the needs of the user, and finds the best location for that renewable energy project to have minimum risk,” Sigal says.

While competitors may offer a type of map with aggregated data, users must still endure the lengthy process of manually checking and validating land parcels. 

“Other methods and companies help understand the data on the land, but are not smart enough to compare all the land with all the parameters to find the best location. We stand out because we find the best land out of every parcel,” he explains. 

According to Sigal, REplace’s ultimate goal is to make renewable energy cost efficient. 

“If it isn’t cheaper than fossil fuels, no big projects will be built,” he says. 

REplace’s algorithm also saves users potentially billions of dollars by selecting sites that simultaneously have maximum revenue potential and cost reduction. 

For example, a location that is a mere few kilometers nearer to an electric connection point compared to a site further away can save a company millions of dollars in electric cable costs. 

Founded in 2022 and located in Haifa, REplace has raised $575,000 to date from investors, angels and VC funds. 

Sigal says he has been passionate about climate change from the age of 13 – learning about impact and as an adult designing businesses in the sector. 

He even moved to Israel from Argentina, he says, because he always wanted to do something big that would help combat climate change, and Israel was the right place to do it. 

While he evaluated scores of different problems, solutions, ideas and technologies, it wasn’t until he himself was faced with a problem in his job in energy technology that he was inspired to create REplace. 

He had been tasked with finding land for renewable energy projects, and saw some projects fail due to the incompatibility of locations chosen. 

Speaking to hundreds of renewable energy developers around the world, who would have to spend up to six months checking data for locations, helped him to understand both the market and the magnitude of the problem. 

“We are disrupting how the development of renewable energy is being done,” he says. 

The company is currently working with a handful of partners, including EDF Renewables Israel, which is part of the EDF Group (France’s national electricity company); Doral Energy, the Israeli makers of renewable energy semiconductors; and Elawan Energy – a Spanish-based international energy firm that has operations in California and Israel. 

“Our vision is to be the one-stop tool for developing renewable energy projects and be the platform that energy developers use every morning, together with their morning coffee,” says Sigal. 

What could be more energizing than that? 

The post Mixing Real Estate & Renewable Energy For A Greener World appeared first on NoCamels.

Tel Aviv-based startup Platypus has created a delivery agent to which pesticide companies can add their product before it is introduced directly to the crops. 

The debut product Platyform is a ready-to-use gel that slowly releases added compounds such as essential oils and pheromones, driving away insects that prey on plants over a greater time period. 

“The evaporation of these pheromones today [takes] on average 10 to 12 weeks,” Platypus co-founder and CEO Gilad Yarkoni, a polymer engineer and designer product specialist, tells No Camels. 

“We want to prolong it to 24 weeks and then you get the full season so it’s more cost effective to the farmer.” 

Pesticides are known for quickly losing their effectiveness in protecting crops and having detrimental effects on the surrounding environment. 

Commonly used pesticide permethrin, for example, only has a half life (when it has lost half of its potency) of 40 days when administered to soil. 

And according to the US National Pesticide Information Center, traditional pesticides may become airborne, leak into the soil, enter bodies of water or even be absorbed by plants and ingested by animals. 

Platypus’ gel is biodegradable and designed to be more effective on pests than traditional solutions, the company states. The gel is placed underneath or next to the crop – avoiding direct contact – and its thick consistency prevents the active pesticides from leaching into the surrounding environment. 

Yarkoni says Platyform offers multiple ways to carry out the pesticide treatment without the need for spraying or coating – the two traditional methods.

“In a greenhouse, you can put the gel in a  small container and it will fume around to repel insects, it can be in the field,” he explains. 

“It can also use pheromones in traps to catch the pests, or create some kind of a barrier around trees to deter snails.”

The company was founded three years ago by Yarkoni along with Marina Arsgavsky Rosental, who recently joined as co-founder and CBO. Its name is an homage to the multi-faceted and unique features of the unusual mammal. 

Originally intending to create active pesticide ingredients, the company pivoted to address the issue of delivering pesticides to crops and facilitating a more efficient and sustainable agricultural solution.

The company recently received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority to help fund six months of technology validation in greenhouses and beehives across the country. 

Due to start the trials in the coming days, the company aims to prove its ability to provide prolonged delivery of pheromones and control pests such as the varroa mite – one of the world’s most dangerous threats to bees.

The company has devised a B2B business model, intending to market Platyform to pesticide producers whose current products must navigate a lengthy approval process. 

Because it is a non-active delivery agent, Platypus aims to reduce the time it will take its pesticide company partners to receive regulatory approval. This is because the companies will be changing the delivery mechanism and not seeking approval for an entirely new pesticide. 

“We can cooperate with big companies and small companies, and they can use our gel with our technology for their new products, to speed up the 12 years [of regulation approval] and shorten it to five to nine years,” Yarkoni says.

Once the trials are completed satisfactorily, the company aims to market its product primarily in Europe. 

In the future, Platypus aims for their gel solution to also enter markets such as food storage and sanitization, as the biodegradable and natural features of the product make it safe for animal ingestion and capable of deploying anti-bacterial agents. 

“Platypus aims to bring together ecology, materials, engineering, production, R&D, logistics, and everything else into one functional, unique solution,” Yarkoni says.

The post Gel Supplement Makes Pesticides Longer Lasting & More Sustainable appeared first on NoCamels.

The Paris and New York-based company creates plant-based alternatives to animal and synthetic materials, starting with their own luxury fashion brand Savian, which offers faux fur, shearling and fleece fabrics crafted purely from plant fibers. 

The company was co-founded two years ago by Israeli entrepreneur and CCO Roni GamZon, Austrian biochemist and CEO Martin Stübler, and American textile executive and COO Steven Usdan. 

Today, Bio-Fluff’s vegan faux fur is already being used by international luxury brands, including Stella McCartney and Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH). Danish fashion brand Ganni is also onboard, working with Bio-Fluff to create a line of sustainable handbags.  

“Sixty to 70 percent of the fashion industry emissions come from materials,” GamZon tells NoCamels. And she wanted to revolutionize that statistic. 

The fashion industry is notorious for its lack of green credentials. According to the McKinsey & Company consulting firm, the industry produces the same amount of greenhouse gasses annually as the economies of France, Germany and the UK together.  

And if it does not cut its emissions in half by 2030, it will violate the steps to mitigate climate change laid out in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.  

The Bio-Fluff fur is free of animals, plastic and even petrochemicals, the company says. The materials it does use are entirely plant-based, as are the enzymes that are key to the transformation into fur. 

The company believes that its product creates up to 90 percent less emissions than real fur, as it does not require the resource-heavy – and frequently cruel – involvement of live animals. 

“We frame the solution around using existing raw materials,” GamZon explains, adding that those materials are sourced directly from European farmers. After that, the company partnered with what she calls “the right factories” in Italy for the different steps in the manufacturing process. 

“We found a few family-owned factories that were very, very happy to work with us on something new,” she says.

To maintain the environmentally friendly quality of the product, the plant fibers used to make the fur are not spun into yarn, thereby avoiding an energy-consuming step, Stübler recently told a UK publication. 

The founding team’s diverse expertise significantly accelerated the company’s development from a mere concept to a market-ready, scalable product, GamZon says. 

“We’re a plug and play solution to the existing industry,” GamZon says.

The startup quickly made a name for itself in fashion circles, in particular in Paris, participating in the LVMH’s exclusive accelerator program Maison des Startups in 2022. The program accepts just 50 startups each year from around the world. 

“We got into the LVMH incubator,” GamZon recalls. “It was a big, big help for us because they helped us get in contact with their [luxury fashion] brands.”  

Investment soon followed, with the company raising $2.5 million in its Series A funding round. 

“There was just so much interest because there was such a need in the market,” GamZon says. 

“We’re talking to almost every brand; some are today prototyping, some are still trying to introduce it at the right time, the right collection, the right aesthetic. But it’s been crazy how much interest we’ve gotten.” 

GamZon guided Bio-Fluff towards the high-end fashion market, leveraging a collaboration with Stella McCartney to introduce sustainable fur in her pre-fall collection – something she calls a pivotal advancement towards eco-friendly fashion.

“We launched the first partnership with Stella McCartney at COP28 in Dubai [in November 2023,] as part of her pre-fall collection,” GamZon says.

She explains that the company began in the luxury market due to the high costs of production for the nascent Bio-Fluff that meant the product was also pricey.  

“In the beginning, you can only produce so much [so] the price is higher,” GamZon says. 

“I was really strict on how we do it, with which partners [and] at what time,” she explains. “I really treated it as a luxury product and a luxury brand of materials.” 

GamZon now envisions Bio-Fluff’s sustainable solution permeating every aspect of the fashion industry, becoming the norm across all sectors – from high street retailers to fashion giants. 

She also hopes the company will make a mark in toy production, interior design and even packaging.   

“Once you start thinking about it,” she says, “there’s so many fluffy materials that are all plastic.” 

The post Fake Fur, Real Sustainability: Company Fighting Pollution In Fashion  appeared first on NoCamels.

But had he been aware of the true potential of the beloved tuber, Sam the gardener may well have produced an extended edition of his recipe list. 

Israeli startup PoLoPo is using molecular farming (creating useful proteins inside plants) to get potatoes to cultivate egg white protein – planting, growing and harvesting the modified vegetables as usual, before extracting the protein and turning it into powder for use in commercial food production. 

And according to the startup, it could help the issue of food security as the world gets hotter and more populated. 

The company creates ovalbumin (the main protein in egg white) from open source sequencing and using its new proprietary SuperAA platform, inserts it into the potato, PoLoPo co-founder and CEO Maya Sapir-Mir tells NoCamels. 

“One of the most important things for us is that the plant itself grows normally,” Sapir-Mir says. 

“Firstly, so that the farmers know how to [handle] the crop, and so that we don’t affect the growth factors – the timing and the length of the growth and the yield,” she explains. 

In fact, she says, the modified version is almost identical to growing unmodified potatoes. The main difference is that while potatoes are usually mainly laden with starch, the modified ones also contain the egg protein. 

“Sometimes they also look a little different – they’re not specifically round,” she says. “But it doesn’t affect the growth of the plant.” 

Sapir-Mir explains that the process of extracting the protein from the harvested potatoes is also very similar to the long-established process of extracting starch from them. 

In fact, she says, this is one of the reasons why the company chose to work with potatoes. The only real difference is that the created protein is more delicate than starch and so more care must be taken in the extraction process.  

Once the potatoes are harvested, they are crushed to produce the juice from the liquid-dense vegetable (both cooked and raw potatoes are more than 75 percent water). 

The starch is extracted first from what Sapir-Mir says is called the “potato juice,” leaving behind a mixture made up of the egg white protein and the potato’s own protein.  

And while the potato’s protein content is lower than ovalbumin, the US National Center for Biotechnology Information describes it as being of good quality, with high biological value.  

Once extracted, the company transforms the protein into a powder, which can then be sold on an industrial scale for use as an ingredient in food. PoLoPo is strictly a B2B company, Sapir-Mir says. 

According to the Allied Market Research organization, the egg protein market is set to reach an annual worth of $38.9 billion by 2026. Its industrial value lies not just in its nutritional value but also in its use as an emulsifier, thickener and gelling agent. It is also used in animal feed and cosmetics, the organization says.  

PoLoPo, which is based on Kibbutz Gan Shlomo in central Israel, was created by Sapir-Mir and co-founder and CTO Raya Liberman-Aloni in 2022. The name translated from Hebrew means “here, not here” – a reference to growing proteins in an unexpected location.

“I knew plants are amazing factories,” says Sapir-Mir, who specializes in metabolic engineering in plants and, like Liberman-Aloni, has a PhD in plant sciences. 

“For me, it was so obvious that what we needed to do was make the plants into factories for producing protein.” 

The partners did not initially settle on working with potatoes, Sapir-Mir says, pointing out that other companies are doing similar work with creating protein in seeds and even tobacco plants. The other companies, however, are developing entirely plant-based technology and not using egg protein.  

When the idea of using potatoes came up, everything fell into place, she recalls. 

“All the [extraction] processes are already there,” she says. “It has an amazing yield in the field. It’s a relatively cheap crop to grow – we grow it all over the world in almost any climate. It’s an amazing crop to work with and we believe it can be very cost effective.”  

Beyond the accessibility and yield, Sapir-Mir maintains that growing proteins inside potatoes is a sustainable, environmentally friendly solution to food insecurity – in particular the dairy farming of which egg production is a part. The farming industry consumes enormous resources to produce food, resources that she says could and should be used to feed people directly. 

Not only does the egg protein require no more resources than land that would already be growing potatoes, but it also has no animal content at all, making it suitable for vegans. 

“We are not touching animals at any stage, we just use the [protein] sequence,” she says.  

 The company has received investment from around the world, including the US and Europe as well as Israel. And while it will take another couple of years until it is ready to be marketed, PoLoPo has already begun pilot schemes in Israel and is working with food companies to decide on how best to use the potato-grown protein commercially. 

Sapir-Mir says that the company plans to set up shop in the United States next year, with an eye on marketing the protein there in 2026.  And to do that, PoLoPo will need approval from both the United States Department of Agriculture (due to the genetic modification involved in the process) and the Food and Drug Administration. 

She says that these processes are already underway, helped by the fact that the US understands that there will be no food security without genetic modification and by the fact that potatoes are seen as a grass and generally recognized as safe.

“I believe that eventually we will need more effective ways to produce our food,” Sapir-Mir concludes, “and this is one way to do that.” 

The post Making Potatoes Into ‘Factories’ For Growing Egg Protein appeared first on NoCamels.

One Israeli startup is working on making that a reality, developing a specialized vending machine that grows a variety of high-quality, nutritious leafy greens inside it, and in less time than it takes in a field. 

The vending machines created by replantin’ grow individual plants inside them, each placed as a seed within a proprietary pod about the size of a coffee capsule, which provides all the nutrients it needs to grow.  

The vending machine, called the Produce Integrated Cultivation Instrument (PICI), contains multiple shelves, each holding a different type of vegetable, allowing for the varying conditions the plants need to grow. 

“Once [the seed] has sprouted, the climate and other conditions change gradually and the shelf will automatically enter into the different stages of growing,” replantin’ founder and CEO Guy Elitzur tells NoCamels. 

The first-of-its-kind machine also has an irrigation system that automatically pumps water in and out of the bottom of each shelf several times a day – constantly supplying the plants with just the right amount of water they need, according to species.  

An AI-powered camera monitors the growth of each plant, verifying its readiness for consumption and then allowing it to be dispensed by the vending machine.

“It’s like a small factory that grows and supplies the produce,” Elitzur says. 

The company plans to place the vending machines in supermarkets and restaurants. An app accompanying the PICI allows these shops and eateries to monitor the growth of the plants and also to order fresh capsules when needed. 

replantin’ was created in early 2023, after Elitzur, a serial entrepreneur with extensive agricultural experience, realized that the leafy greens grown worldwide, many of which wither quickly, needed to travel far distances to get to market – a costly process that does not always ensure that the vegetables arrive in peak freshness. 

“These types of crops need to be kept in the refrigerator and have a short life, which is an issue,” Elitzur says, explaining that around 60 percent of lettuces are lost during the move from farm to shop. 

He hopes that the vending machine will create an alternative to the current supply chain for restaurants and supermarkets, creating a more cost-effective solution that will reduce food waste as the produce is grown and sold in the entirely same location. 

The PICI is also an answer to the expensive cost of labor involved in agriculture by automating the process, Elitzur explains. Furthermore, because replantin’ is selling the seeds inside capsules and not fully grown plants, it reduces the price of shipping, makes storage easier and avoids the challenge of ensuring that the produce remains fresh.   

replantin’ is currently focusing on leafy greens and herbs as they have a shorter growth period compared to other vegetables. 

Elitzur points out that the vegetables in the PICI do not undergo any genetic modification at all and that the ecosystem created within the vending machine means that there is no need for pesticides.  

“Part of not using pesticides is the ability to grow with no contamination [and] to create a microclimate around the plant that does not develop any bacterial disease or other humidity-related conditions,” he explains. 

He says that the machines also have another major advantage – a far shorter growth period for vegetables. From seeding to harvest takes between 18 to 21 days, he says, as compared to a lettuce in the field that can take four to six weeks to grow. 

replantin’ is currently conducting trials ahead of releasing the PICI on the market. At present, the company is funded by Elitzur and his team but they hope to bring in investors as they develop the product.

Elitzur believes that increasing urbanization, climate change and a growing global population have made current farming methods unsustainable – and the PICI is one answer to these pressing problems. 

“The food supply chain – from seed all the way to harvest – has to be changed,” says Elitzur. 

As such, he believes that the PICI will ultimately free up farmers to use their fields for more urgently needed vegetables, and will also help agriculturalists adopt more efficient farming methods such as vertical farming.

“We truly believe that vertical farming is part of the solution and that we are trying to be part of this,” says Elitzur. “The sky’s the limit.”

The post Get Your Greens From A Vending Machine That Grows The Veg Inside appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup, however, has developed a solution that potentially saves huge amounts of the precious water used in farming, by monitoring how much of it crops actually need to grow. 

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that climate change is having a real impact on the planet’s water cycle, causing an upheaval in how irrigation is used in agriculture and affecting food security in both rural and urban environments. 

Treetoscope’s premise is a simple one, which had hitherto been confined to the realm of R&D without ever being put into practice: measuring the vital water intake of a plant or tree from inside and reassessing irrigation practices based on that data.  

The startup developed a sensor that is placed directly into the trunk or stem of a crop, which uses increases in temperature to track the water uptake of the plant – based on the premise that this action expends energy, which in turn creates heat. 

The data amassed by the sensors is transmitted to an analytics algorithm, which translates the changes in temperature into the amount of water taken in by the plant. 

And all too frequently, a plant is receiving far too much water, Treetoscope CEO Dotan Eshet tells NoCamels. 

“People are irrigating by tens of percentage points over what they should be,” Eshet explains, pointing out that most of the world’s water usage – some 70 percent – is taken up by the agriculture sector.

And the Treetoscope sensor, he says, can reduce water consumption in agriculture by to 40 percent. 

Perhaps just as importantly, Eshet says, when a plant is over-irrigated, the fertilizers it is supposed to receive are “flushed” out without having any real impact on the crops. Furthermore, he says, the European Union has recently introduced tighter regulations on fertilizer use, which means that those countries cannot compensate for what has been lost.  

The sensor itself was brought to life by Treetoscope’s co-founders – Eshet and CTO Ori Ahiman, both agritech sector veterans – who created the startup in December 2020. 

The company is based at the Mikve Israel complex in Holon – a surprisingly tranquil, pastoral environment in a city that boasts one of the country’s biggest industrial zones. Today the startup employs around 30 people, half of whom are women. 

Eshet tells NoCamels that Ahiman, who holds multiple degrees in plant physiology, had already developed the rudimentary premise of the sensor when the two decided to work together. 

“I met him when it was a shoebox with some wires,” he recalls. The size of the device may not have changed but the look certainly has, with all wires carefully concealed in a green container that nestles against the plant. 

The two then successfully completed a proof of concept stage for industry leaders, among them a senior official at Israeli company Netafim, the world’s largest producer of drip irrigation systems.  

“All of them said that if it works, it will revolutionize precision irrigation,” Eshet says. 

“It was working when I met him,” he adds. “So we turned it into a product that can be sold.”  

Some systems can inform on irrigation by measuring water in the soil, Eshet says, but no one else has produced a sensor to monitor water intake from inside the plant. 

“Let’s say that you have your refrigerator full of food but you don’t know how to open it,” he explains. “It’s the same [with irrigation] and we want to measure what’s going inside of the plants.” 

The sensor and accompanying technology are remarkably easy to install and use, according to Eshet. The device is directly inserted into the tree or plant and the data it collects is sent to an AI-driven analytics platform, which for now is web based, although a mobile app is on the way. 

“We can just ship it to a farmer and he can install it by himself in two minutes,” Eshet says. 

Farmers do not need a sensor for each stem, defining the amount of water for an entire crop by the intake of one plant.  

The device in the field is powered by a battery that can last up to two years. Using solar power, he explains, would strip away the simplicity of the premise of the sensor and add a layer of complexity to the purposely straightforward installation. 

The interface comes in several languages, reflecting the different nations currently using Treetoscope. These include Turkey, the US, Mexico and several European nations. 

The startup has partnered with leading irrigation companies to get its product to market, Eshet says. The first such company was Netafim and soon after, Treetoscope partnered with the Minnesota-based Toro Company, which makes micro-irrigation systems for agriculturalists. 

Together with Toro, Treetoscope won the 2023 new product of the year award by the Irrigation Association, a prize that Treetoscope project manager Maya Asher calls “a huge win” for the startup. 

“We went up against all the big names,” she says. “The recognition and the validation of our technology is what keeps us going.”

Its presence today in multiple countries is enough for now, Eshet says, although there is a plan to expand into Australia as well. 

“This industry needs to be changed,” he says. “No one has managed to do it until now. It’s a challenge, but we will make it.” 

The post Simple Sensor For What Plants Drink Helps Preserve Precious Water   appeared first on NoCamels.

One Israeli startup has developed a solution that keeps fruits and vegetables fresh for longer without changing or adding anything to the produce themselves. 

Ness Ziona-based Liva has developed a sticker that when applied to the package, can extend the freshness of fruits and vegetables for up to another seven days. 

The sticker was created by Ifat Hammer, co-founder and CTO, drawing on her expertise in food engineering and biotechnology. She figured that instead of modifying the produce itself, “good” bacteria that was already present in the fruit or vegetable could be used to delay the growth of “bad” bacteria.  

To do so, she and co-founder and CEO Ifat Peled Dinstag worked on making a four-layered sticker, a little larger than a postage stamp, which contains a proprietary prebiotic formula that attracts “good” bacteria known as bacillus subtilis.  

Bacillus subtilis is a bacterium that naturally grows in soil and water, and, unlike many other bacteria, does not possess traits that can cause disease.

“They are considered to be environmental bacteria and the sticker is like a food station for them,” Peled Dinstag tells NoCamels.

The prebiotic in the sticker feeds this bacteria, helping it grow and reproduce quickly. And once it grows, it prevents other harmful bacteria from completely taking over, hence keeping the produce better for longer.

Peled Dinstag explains, however, that harmful bacteria is not killed off and will eventually still grow and cause the produce to go bad. But the difference in the time it takes to decompose is clearly visible when comparing a control group of produce and a group using the Liva sticker. 

“We don’t kill [the bacteria], it is very important to say that there is some growth, but it’s not the same rhythm,” she says. 

The Liva formula, a trade secret, was the most challenging part for the team. Finding one that could work and bring the desired reaction was complicated. 

The formula also takes into consideration water and weather, two factors that often make food go bad faster. 

Water helps good bacteria reach the sticker, by stimulating the prebiotic that attracts it, and the moisture found naturally in produce is used in this way. 

Peled Dinstag says that raising the surrounding temperature even by just two degrees can make produce go bad faster, but as long as the sticker is placed on the container, produce can be kept at higher temperatures for longer periods of time. 

The most important part for her, she explains, is keeping the taste fresh and unaffected by the sticker. But because the sticker does not modify or add anything to the produce, the taste will maintain its freshness even after most best-before dates have expired. 

“It’s not only about the cost, it’s also about the taste,” Peled Dinstag says. 

Today, she adds, it is extremely hard for consumers to find really tasty cherry tomatoes or grapes, often because they have been rendered tasteless due to the modifications made in an effort to maintain freshness.

The company, which Peled Dinstag says is unique in its creation, is currently conducting a pilot with a major Israeli supermarket chain, as well as smaller trials in other countries including the US. 

The startup envisions a strictly business-to-business model, only working with large-scale sellers of fruit and vegetables who deal with tens of thousands of tons of produce each year. 

Liva, which was founded in 2021, is currently funded by venture capital firms and still raising money to further develop its technology. 

Peled Dinstag says these developments include cardboard boxes and other produce containers embedded with the same prebiotic formula throughout, which will keep produce fresher for an even longer period of time.

They are also working on new formulas, and so far have successfully developed nine. Out of those nine, they are now focusing on four that help grapes, cherry tomatoes, strawberries and blueberries stay fresh. 

Eventually they want to also work with food with close expiration dates like hummus, cheese or bread and not only fruits and vegetables. 

“We are here to save the world in a way,” Peled Dinstag says, referring to fears for future food security due to climate change, as well as the stickers reducing the need for non-sustainable packaging for produce and even CO2 emissions due to less frequent resupply to supermarkets.

“We have already begun to understand the importance for humanity and the environment.”

The post Keeping Fruits And Vegetables Fresh With A Simple Sticker  appeared first on NoCamels.

Realizing just how crucial it is to maximize the production of food staples, Israeli agritech company SaliCrop developed a way to protect seeds from adverse environmental factors, known as abiotic stresses, making it possible to grow crops successfully in even the toughest of conditions. 

These yield-reducing stresses include extremes of heat, light and soil salinity, all hallmarks of perilous shifts in weather and climate patterns. 

One of the main challenges tackled by the SaliCrop solution is salinity in soil, which is triggered by rising sea levels and increased evaporation due to higher temperatures, and is one of the greatest threats to crop production worldwide. 

According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), salinization triggered by climate change is set to impact half of all arable land on the planet by 2050. 

What is more, the organization warns, the worst hit by this phenomenon will be people in developing countries, in particular the poorest farmers, most of whom are women. 

SaliCrop’s solution trains seeds to preemptively defend themselves from abiotic stresses, in particular salinity. This means that the seeds are either pre-prepared to resist the challenges posed by these stresses when they are placed in the ground or to completely disregard them altogether.  

“[SaliCrop] is unique in the sense that we’re actually harnessing the natural mechanism responsible for [responding to] the abiotic stressors,” the company’s CEO Carmit Oron tells NoCamels.  

“You’re making the seeds aware that there’s going to be stress in the field,” she explains. “We give the seeds a kind of command to operate some of its systems and to shut down some of the other systems to be able to cope with the stress.”  

Oron says that the process is not connected to genetic modification at all. Indeed, SaliCrop calls the process “a gentle nudge” of the seeds that not only boosts their resilience but also increases their fertility. 

“Under SaliCrop’s treatment, plants not only thrive in poor quality, highly saline soil through enhanced nutrient absorption and improved root structures, but they also exhibit increased vigor and superior germination rates,” said Oron. 

“This innovation turns marginal lands, previously considered barren, into fertile grounds capable of abundant food production. As climate change intensifies, farmers globally are in urgent need of sustainable solutions to adapt and succeed,” she said.  

SaliCrop’s joint founders – Dr. Ṛcā Godbole, a plant biologist from Mumbai who today is the company’s chief scientific officer, and chairman and agricultural engineering expert Dr. Sharon Devir of Israel – spent eight years developing the technology. They were inspired by too-salty soil in Mumbai and the desire to support farmers worldwide who are faced with declining yields due to salinity.  

The SaliCrop solution, explains Oron, works at the most crucial time for seed growth, namely the first 60 days. It can also boost a crop’s yield by up to 25 percent, depending on the strain, although the average increase is around 10 percent. 

“It depends on the crop, on the region and on the stress, of course,” she says, adding that one can regard it as a harvest whose yield has been boosted, or as a harvest whose losses due to abiotic stresses have been mitigated. 

And according to Oron, while other companies have used gene modification to improve yields and make seeds more resistant, SaliCrop is the only one to do so using natural mechanisms and is one of the very few to focus on a solution for soil salinity. 

The treatment has been in use in Israeli tomato fields since 2021, working with the country’s largest crop producers. Oron says the results have been more than promising, with an average yield increase of 10 percent across the board. She points out, however, that last year one strain of tomatoes even saw 23-percent growth in its yield.  

The company is now working with farmers in multiple locations around the world, including India, Portugal, Senegal, Spain, Turkey and Ukraine.  

In Europe, Oron points out, most agriculturalists are more concerned with heat stress than salinity, another issue that SaliCorp addresses with its seed solution.

In fact, for the past two years SaliCrop has been in use in tomato fields in Spain, where a leading European think tank warns that climate change has already led to desertification of 20 percent of the country’s mainland – and more than half of the rest is at risk.  

In most of the countries where it is used, Oron says the results have been impressive. 

“We’ve seen increases in yield in the double digits,” she says. “In India, at least a 15-percent increase, in Turkey, we’ve seen 19 percent and in Senegal 21 percent.” 

All the data, Oron maintains, comes from SaliCrop’s farming partners and not from the company itself. 

Aside from tomato, SaliCrop has been developing solutions for some 15 crops, including pepper, onion, broccoli, rice and alfalfa. But according to Oron, the company ultimately decided to focus on high-value crops, which fetch a better price at market. These are primarily grown in the open fields that account for 97 percent of the world’s crops.  

Established in 2013, the Kfar Vitkin-based company has had grants from the Israel Innovation Authority, the Israeli Economy Ministry and the European Union’s now defunct Horizon 2020 R&D program. 

These subsidies, says Oron, are lifeblood to organizations trying to solve momentous issues triggered by the changing world climate. 

“We understand the support of governments and grants are important for companies like us to continue and survive,” she says. “Because we bring a very important solution to the very urgent need of producing more food.” 

The post Stronger Seeds Could Counter Climate Change Food Insecurity  appeared first on NoCamels.

Almost all plants, big and small, rely on the process of photosynthesis (using light, carbon dioxide and water to produce oxygen and energy), and the correct conditions are crucial for its survival.  

But for farmers, knowing how much water to give each plant can be an inexact science, with agriculturalists generally relying on experience and intuition rather than data to gauge the right amounts. 

The technology created by Israeli startup SupPlant aims to end the uncertainty involved in irrigation, using the plant’s own chemical processes to inform how exactly much water to supply and when. 

“It’s basically putting an Apple Watch on a [plant] and having it learn the metrics and learn the heartbeat,” SupPlant CEO Ori Ben Ner tells NoCamels.

The SupPlant sensor measures a plant’s tiny movements (micro variations) every 10 minutes and transmits that data to the cloud, where it is analyzed by the startup’s artificial intelligence platform. These tiny movements are created when a plant expands and contracts due to the water inside it being taken in from the ground and then evaporating during photosynthesis. 

Ben Ner explains that the data is used to understand how a plant grows, which then allows the company to advise on optimum conditions, such as which fertilizer to use, and, most importantly, when to increase the amount of water given to each plant. 

“In simple terms, we learn how plants behave, and according to that we initiate recommendations, mostly around how to irrigate,” he says. 

The data can even help to build a model that can inform a farmer in advance what a certain plant’s needs will be and how to best take care of it even before it is planted. 

“We can understand how a tree or fruit will behave or what size it will be a week or two weeks from now, and make decisions based on that,” he says.

The information on how best to encourage plant growth is even more vital than ever, according to Ben Ner, given the shifts in weather patterns experienced worldwide due to climate change. 

Ben Ner, who has embraced the family’s generations-long tradition of agriculture, says that Afula-based SupPlant, with its unique continuous monitoring of plants, can tell the farmers what is needed and when, regardless of seasonal norms.  

“All of the know-how of any farmer you will ever meet is based on specific seasons and specific weather patterns, that [today] are behaving erratically or unstably, to say the least,” he explains.  

The information in the cloud is accessed via a web-based dashboard made up of charts showing soil moisture, plant absorption and fruit growth. 

The technology used in the sensors already existed and was available, he explains, but had not been used outside of university research. And, he says, it was the company founder who decided to take the existing technology and use it in the fields in dry regions of the world.   

Today, nine years after the company was created, the sensors are in use in multiple countries in multiple regions of the world, including Australia, Israel, Mexico, Morocco and the UAE. 

In Israel, SupPlant currently works with several wineries, while in Australia and Mexico, the sensors are in use by some of the biggest fruit companies. 

And now, Ben Ner tells NoCamels, SupPlant is working on adapting their sensor for grain and cereal, which the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization says are the most commonly produced crops worldwide. 

“These are crops that are generally not irrigated but rain fed, that are really disturbed and disrupted very much because of droughts or uneven rain events,” he says. 

“This is really the ability of humanity to grow food.” 

The post ‘Smart Watch’ For Plants Keeps Crops Irrigated As Climate Changes appeared first on NoCamels.

“In tomatoes, there is a trait of tiny cracks called microcracking,” Supree VP Strategy and Growth Yana Voldman tells NoCamels. 

“It’s a known trait and we didn’t invent it, but we knew that in classical breeding, it is taken out of the varieties,” she explains. 

“For fresh produce, you want to keep all the moisture and juice and you want to keep the fraud plump and juicy inside firm. So you take this trait out during the breeding process [and] we did exactly the opposite.” 

The Supree tomato strain is uniquely bred so that the tiny cracks expand and allow the moisture within the fruit to evaporate naturally during the growing process. This maintains the taste and color that makes the cherry tomato so appealing, and also preserves the nutritional benefits, such as antioxidants and vitamins, that turns it into a superfood. 

By the time the tomatoes have ripened, they have lost around 80 percent of their weight through evaporation. They are harvested before the entire water content of the fruit has evaporated, and while the tomatoes may go through a further limited drying process, this does not include additives or other non-natural preservatives.  

“They don’t need additional processing; there’s no use of additives, and that also reduces the waste,” says Voldman. 

Supree is a subsidiary of NRGene Technologies, a Ness Ziona-based company that previously mapped the genome (genetic makeup) of the sweet potato, bread and even pasta. The startup specializes in self-drying fruit and vegetables, utilizing NTGene’s advanced technology and artificial intelligence developments. 

At present the tomatoes are picked by hand, although Supree says it intends to introduce mechanical harvesting, which the company believes will lower prices. Indeed, Israeli startup MetoMotion, based in the northern city of Yokneam Illit, has already created a robot that can pick tomatoes automatically. 

Tomatoes are extremely popular within Israel, with Israelis consuming on average 20 kilos of the fruit apiece each year. 

While local legend has it that the cherry tomato was wholly invented in Israel, in reality it was several species of the wild plant that were developed into their current globally popular forms by Israeli scientists in the 1970s. Among those species, which were bred for sweetness and a more robust harvest, is the Tomaccio – a sweet cherry tomato specifically grown for the sun-dried market.  

Once they are picked, the tomatoes are frozen in order to be shipped and stored without spoiling. Again, Voldman says, the emphasis is on natural processes.

“Instead of using preservatives or other types of chemicals, we just freeze the product and because of the low moisture content of the tomato, it freezes perfectly and defrosts in a perfect state,” she explains. 

This means that tomatoes can be stored for up to one year. 

Primarily the company says it will focus on selling the fruit directly within the food industry in Israel, Europe and the Middle East, rather than to individual consumers. Direct sale to consumers, Voldman says, will be available in the next couple of years. 

Supree says the product is ideal for a range of dishes, including baked goods, salads and even desserts, and at least one culinary industry expert agrees.  

“Occasionally, I come across something truly new and such are the cherry tomatoes that self-dry on the vine,” said veteran Israeli chef Ran Shmueli, who runs the high-end Claro restaurant in Tel Aviv, which specializes in Mediterranean dishes. 

“Their taste, uniqueness, and innovation elevate and enrich our dishes and menus,” Shmueli said. 

Supree believes that its self-sun drying tomatoes will be ready for market by mid-2024, with an estimated market potential of $1.5 billion by 2030, carved out of the existing $16 billion annual market for dried tomatoes.  

The company also envisions a successful entry into the dried fruit market, worth $10.2 billion each year; the frozen fruit market, which runs to an annual $4.4 billion; and the superfood market, worth $60 billion yearly. 

With that in mind, it has partnered with Haifa-based company Tzabar Tech, drawing on its agritech experience in order to maximize the cultivation and post-harvest processes. 

“The collaboration between Tzabar Tech and Supree presents an excellent opportunity to integrate innovative growth technologies, while allowing farmers to improve work processes and achieve more profitable yields,” said Tzabar Tech CEO Gilad Mintz. 

And with cherry tomatoes conquered and cured, Supree is now looking to expand its line to other self-drying crops, primarily another Israeli staple, the bell pepper.  

“We can do similar things with many fruits and vegetables,” Voldman says. 

“They are not always cracked, but there are lots of traits that we can work with to create [the self-drying] in different fruits and vegetables.” 

The post Israeli Cherry Tomatoes That Dry Themselves In The Sun  appeared first on NoCamels.

According to Friends of the Earth, the world’s largest environmental organization that operates in 73 countries, the future survival of bees on the planet is not guaranteed. In 2020 alone, it says, nearly 46 percent of honey bee colonies were lost, while there were also drastic declines in wild bee populations.  

A beekeeper for decades, Eliyah Radzyner was determined to tackle the issue. With his vast experience of beekeeping, Radzyner invited his friend and entrepreneur Saar Safra to collaborate on creating an AI-operated beehive.

Together, the two set up Beewise, a robotic hive that monitors the insects around the clock through video cameras and temperature sensors in order to help understand what was killing the bees. 

“You can actually know if there is a disease or if the bees are hungry and the AI sees all that,” Safra tells NoCamels. 

The hive itself is a box-like structure that can support 10 completely separate bee colonies at once. 

“They don’t mix and match because they all have separate queens and they all behave differently,” Safra says.

To move the bees from their original hive to the new AI-driven one, the frames of honeycomb are placed in the new location along with the queen – and the rest of the hive follows automatically. 

According to Safra, it takes the bees a few hours to orient themselves to their new location, but once they do, they are completely acclimated. 

The AI slowly identifies how the bees act as a colony inside the hive. The automated system can feed the bees and if necessary dose them with medication. Both of these functions are carried out through the hive’s robotic arm, which is also operated by AI. Should the supply of food and medication run low, the algorithm alerts the beekeepers – and if a predator manages to make its way into the hive, the arm can drive them off. 

The solar-powered hive has gaps on all sides to allow bees to enter and exit unhindered. Each gap can be opened and closed by the AI system, which also controls all the other robotic mechanisms of the hive, including the cameras and sensors. The gaps are completely sealed when the beekeepers know that pesticide – one of the main causes of bee deaths – is being used nearby, keeping the insects safe. 

According to Safra, the AI has a 99.98 percent success rate when it comes to caring for the bees – giving them medication, controlling the temperature and providing nourishment. 

“It’s very accurate at identifying and providing the right solution,” he says. 

Even so, he says, the AI platform still cannot prevent a small number of bee deaths, with around eight percent of the hive dying naturally every year. 

The system is not entirely human-free. The bees still make honey that needs to be extracted, and the AI hive owners use the same method that is used in normal wood hives: removing the outer panels of the hive, taking out the honeycombs and manually gathering the honey. 

Safra believes that the most important part of the Beewise project is having a constant check on the bees, to catch any potential problems at an early stage. 

“Beekeepers are always either too late or they don’t know what to do [to protect the bees],” he says. 

Beewise is already available in the US (its biggest market), Israel and the UAE, and supplements its revenue with backing from venture capital funds. 

And Safra hopes to grow the company until wooden hives are no longer needed, something he predicts will happen in the near future. 

“We don’t believe that the wooden box, the traditional beehive, is good for bees any longer,” he says. 

He insists that BeeWise does not want to change the world of beekeeping, just make it easier to take care of the honey makers. 

“We don’t interfere with the biology of the bee,” he says.

The post AI Hive Cares And Protects Increasingly Endangered Bees  appeared first on NoCamels.

Using gene editing technology called CRISPR, the researchers reduced the amount of time in which a plant allows water to evaporate from its leaves – a process called transpiration. Less transpiration means the need for less irrigation for the plant. 

The water reaches the surface of the leaf through openings called stomata, but because these are also used to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, they cannot be manipulated to remain closed permanently. 

Reducing carbon dioxide intake means reduced photosynthesis, which has a negative impact on plant growth. 

The researchers found that by limiting the full opening of the stomata, they could reduce the amount of transpiration, while also allowing for sufficient carbon dioxide intake for enough photosynthesis to occur.  

This was achieved by targeting the ROP9 gene, whose removal made the stomata partially shut, and was particularly effective during the middle of the day, when the sun is at its hottest and transpiration at its fullest.  

“We discovered that eliminating ROP9 by the CRISPR technology causes a partial closure of the stomata,” said Prof. Shaul Yalovsky of the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at Tel Aviv University, whose lab hosted the research. 

“This effect is particularly pronounced during midday, when the rate of water loss from the plants in the transpiration process is at its highest. Conversely, in the morning and afternoon, when the transpiration rate is lower, there was no significant difference in the rate of water loss between the control plants and ROP9-modified plants. Because the stomata remained open in the morning and afternoon, the plants were able to uptake enough carbon dioxide,” he said.

The researchers hope that the similarity between ROP9 and other proteins in the ROP family will lead to water conservation in a diverse range of other crops, such as pepper, eggplant and wheat.

The results of the study were published in the academic journal PNAS.

The post Tel Aviv University Gene Tech Produces Tomatoes Using Less Water   appeared first on NoCamels.

This is the first time that non-chicken cultivated meat has been approved for market anywhere in the world and the first time that any form of cultivated meat has been authorized for sale in the entire Middle East.  

Rather than harvesting directly from animals, Rehovot-based Aleph Farms grows proteins from the cell cultures that are the building blocks of the Aleph Cuts steaks. 

The first product to go on sale will reportedly be the Petit Steak, made from the cells of a Black Angus cow together with a plant protein mix made from soy and wheat.  

The steaks will only appear in Israeli shops once the company has gone through the required regulatory process, which Alpha Farms expects to complete in the coming months. 

The lab-grown meat is cost effective, sustainable and environmentally friendly, the company says, and could bolster food security in the region, especially during times of conflict.

“The entire Aleph team has united in strength and determination to deliver no matter what during these difficult times in Israel. We are excited to carry this resilience forward in the form of innovation in agriculture and food security,” said Didier Toubia, CEO and co-founder of Aleph Farms. 

“With its global leadership in cellular agriculture, Israel continues to push for greater regional integration and economic collaboration, which will be crucial for stabilizing the region. We believe that addressing joint challenges like food security is the best way to ensure the prosperity of the Middle East and other parts of the world that rely heavily on massive food imports, especially in Asia,” he said. 

“Aleph Farms… is undoubtedly one of the flagship companies leading the Israeli alternative protein market, and a world leader in its field,” said Ronit Eshel, FoodTech Sector Lead at the Israel Innovation Authority, which has invested in the company.  

“These advanced products carry much anticipation, due to the expected shortage of food, and much due to their positive effect on the climate in terms of carbon emissions, along with the sensitivity to animals. This is a historic day and we are proud to take part in the success,” she said. 

The post In World First, Israel Approves Lab-Grown Beef Steaks For Public Sale  appeared first on NoCamels.

Wanda Fish extracted cells from three different species –  bluefin tuna, mackerel and yellowtail – in order to cultivate them in the lab, and its most advanced product is the pricey bluefin. 

“Bluefin tuna is a premium product. The price of bluefin tuna in the market is very high,” Wanda Fish’s VP Business Development & Marketing Yaron Sfadyah tells NoCamels. 

The tuna can even go for up to $5,000 a pound due to those risks of extinction and overfishing and also because of the high market demand in places such as Japan. 

Wanda Fish cultivates the extracted cells in bioreactors – specialist vats that create an optimal environment – until they reach immortal status, in other words are continuously reproducing. 

“This is one of the prominent first steps, because you want the cells to immortalize spontaneously and in a non-GMO [genetically modified] manner, so that you don’t need to go back to the fish” for more cells, Sfadyah tells NoCamels. 

Wanda Fish then places the cells into cultured media – the essential nutrients and minerals that support growth. From there, the company uses its own undisclosed technology to cultivate the cells into both muscle and intramuscular fat of a bluefin tuna. 

And while Sfadyah says this is the most expensive part of the process, the company is trying to engineer it at a lower cost, a “sweet spot” that preserves the authenticity of the final product and allows Wanda Fish to upscale and start to sell commercially. 

Once the cells are transformed, Wanda Fish combines them with proprietary plant-based material to create a hybrid final product – one of the ways the company is reducing costs and a step that Sfadyah describes as “a very complex process.” He also insists that it is one currently carried out by most, if not all food cultivation companies.  

And despite the inclusion of the plant-based material, Sfadyah believes that the company’s product is identical in every way to the original thanks to the unique fat and muscle combination Wanda Fish cultivates. 

This, he says, even applies to one of the trickiest parts of cultivating such premium fish – striking the right balance between taste and texture. 

For unlike other tunas, bluefin has a melt-in-your-mouth texture with what many chefs say is a rich flavor that works perfectly for sashimi (a kind of sushi). 

Taking its name from the famous John Cleese/Jamie Lee Curtis comedy of the 80s, Wanda Fish was co-founded by Dr. Daphna Heffetz and the Kitchen Hub startup incubator in November 2021. 

The company recently announced the start of its seed stage after receiving more than $7 million in funding from its primary backer, Dutch aquaculture investment firm Aqua-Spark. 

Wanda Fish is now working towards creating its prototype using its advances in R&D. And to create this prototype, the startup is consulting with chefs who know the food industry inside out and have particular experience of preparing bluefin tuna. 

It is crucial, Sfadyah says, that the company brings in these culinary experts as the bluefin tuna has different cuts that require different methods of preparation. Furthermore, Wanda Fish is trying to create the delicate toro cut of the bluefin, the most expensive cut that comes from the fatty underbelly. 

The company is also trying to remove the need for chefs to have to clean and cut the fish when it arrives at their restaurants, reducing food waste and shortening preparation time for diners.

This, he says, will allow them to “develop a good food product that people will want to buy.”  

There are two other companies in the world who are at the moment cultivating lab-grown bluefin tuna, Sfadyah says, but Wanda Fish does not feel the need to rush out its product, trusting that it is working in the correct way and at the correct pace. 

“We believe it’s not necessarily the first mover’s advantage; it’s the right mover’s advantage,” says Sfadyah. 

“We are here to make food.”

The post Making World’s Most Expensive Fish From Plants And Tuna Cells   appeared first on NoCamels.

Dyeing just a single pair of jeans involves thousands of liters of water. And the dye itself comes from synthetic indigo, which is made of a slew of toxic chemicals, including hydrosulfites, that are all later released into the environment via waterways. 

Israeli startup Sonovia has created a way to give blue jeans their quintessential color that both uses a non-toxic dye that is better for the environment and cuts water use by up to 85 percent.

“One of the most polluting processes in the world, across all industries, is textile dyeing,” Roy Hirsch, chief business officer at Sonovia, tells NoCamels. “It accounts for 20 percent of water pollution and three percent of global CO2 emissions.” 

To color the yarn that will ultimately be woven into blue jeans, it normally needs to be fed through a series of rollers, which unwind it into long threads that are dipped in and out of special vats – tubs filled with 1,000 liters of water, chemicals and synthetic dye. 

A pulley draws the threads out of the dye bath to dry before they are dipped in another identical vat. This process takes place 20 times, each time in a fresh vat, before the newly colored threads move on to the next stage of denim manufacture. 

Sonovia, however, uses ultrasound waves that suddenly decrease the pressure of the fluid in the vat. This creates tiny bubbles – known as cavitation bubbles – that rapidly form and collapse, forcing extremely fast jet streams of the dye to coat the yarn.

And because the yarn is dyed in this more efficient way, the threads only need to be dipped a single time – far less than the industry standard of 20, explains Hirsch. 

The startup developed its own non-toxic dye that combines with the water and the ultrasound waves in order to form these bubbles. 

“With the special dye we’ve developed and the mechanical force of the ultrasonic impregnation, the process becomes much faster, and much more efficient,” Hirsch tells NoCamels.

Both innovations, he says, can be easily integrated with existing machinery that is used to dye yarn. 

Sonovia is currently in the process of scaling up its technology by integrating it into the industrial production lines of Italian denim producer PureDenim.

The two companies recently signed an agreement with French luxury group Kering, owner of internationally known brands such as Gucci, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen, to test Sonovia’s technology to create its denim products. 

“The agreement will revolutionize the textile industry and increase sustainability in the fashion world,” Hirsch claims. 

Sonovia’s ultrasound system aside, several other technologies have been developed to ease the environmental strain of dyeing yarn for denim.

The BLUEDYE machine, created by textile machinery manufacturer Karl Mayer, uses nitrogen technology to cut down on half of the chemicals used in dye vats.

Another machine uses foam instead of water to uniformly dye the yarn, which also reduces the amount of chemicals and water needed to produce denim’s ubiquitous color.

But Hirsch says that these methods involve far more upheaval than the Sonovia system.

“In our case, we can integrate the technology easily into existing lines, and the cost is maybe a few hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “That’s massively cheaper than the cost of alternative technologies, which can be in the millions.”

The startup was initially established in 2013 in order to solve the problem of hospital-acquired infections, which causes one in every 31 patients in the United States to fall ill. It first used its ultrasound technology to embed textiles with metal oxides to kill and slow the spread of bacteria and viruses.

The Ramat Gan-based company has since pivoted the development of its technology to address the significant environmental impact of the fashion industry.

Sonovia’s next step, once its denim-dyeing solution becomes commercially available, is to alter its technology so it can be used for the pigments that color sportswear and activewear. 

“The vision of the company is not to stop with indigo dye, but to cover the entire dyeing spectrum… to really cater to the entire fashion industry,” says Hirsch. 

“It’s not going to happen in a day,” he says. “Indigo dye is just the beginning.”

The post Creating Classic Blue Jean Color No Longer Costs The Earth appeared first on NoCamels.

An Israeli startup is looking to put a dent in this statistic by providing bakeries, delis and other food establishments with a platform to specifically sell the food products remaining at the end of the day, which would otherwise be trashed. 

SpareEat’s app lets Israelis purchase “surprise bags” of pastries, sandwiches, produce and more at heavily discounted prices, helping food businesses prevent food waste while still turning a profit.

Unlike other food-saving apps, it does not specify what the user will receive in each bag that they buy. Instead, it gives descriptions of the possible options they could receive, as food establishments cannot guarantee which products will remain in stock at the end of the day.

This, says SpareEat co-founder Jonathan Fischer Toubol, makes the app an easy and effective method for food businesses to cut down on their food waste as well as for consumers to snap up some bargains in Israel’s pricey food market. 

“It’s a really great tool because it’s giving the businesses the right solution to empty their shelves at the end of the day,” he explains. “What you get depends on what remains.”

Since relaunching last August, SpareEat has partnered with nearly 200 Israeli businesses – all in Tel Aviv or in other central cities – and has approximately 80,000 registered users. 

Users who purchase a bag of food through the app must go to the food establishment in person to pick up their purchase, as it cannot be delivered to them. 

Fischer Toubol says that this in-store only feature was intentional, because apart from the logistics and costs involved to include a delivery feature in the app, the small businesses will actually benefit more from the additional foot traffic. 

“We live in a period where food delivery services dominate, which takes people away from these businesses because they can just wait on their sofa to get the food,” he says.

“We only do pickup so that people can discover a shop through the application and become new customers.”

Other food-saving platforms normally charge businesses a monthly fee to advertise their unsold goods, says Fischer Toubol.

SpareEat, on the other hand, earns a small commission on each bag that is sold within the app, which allows businesses to partner with the platform for free. 

That commission, Fischer Toubol says, is the lowest available when compared to other food-saving platforms. 

“We really take the minimum amount possible to continue developing the application and making it available to everyone,” he says. 

“Obviously we want to earn money, but we really see the positive impact that the app has on businesses, and even more during this very complex period in Israel.”

And as far as Fischer Toubol knows, there are no other food rescue apps like this in Israel. 

SpareEat, which is headquartered in Tel Aviv, was initially founded in 2019 by cousins Laetitia Jessner and Elie Fischer, but shut down in 2020 after Israeli COVID-19 regulations restricted people from picking up food in person. 

“It was impossible to develop this app during this period,” says Fischer Toubol, who was working for the company at the time. “But I must say that it allowed us to learn from our mistakes and changed the concept a little.”

He relaunched the app with Jessner in August, three years after it closed, and says it has received even more users and traffic the second time around. 

Last month, the SpareEat app launched a new donation feature as part of a collaboration with the Yad LaTet (A Hand to Give) organization, helping to provide weekly Shabbat meals and equipment to soldiers fighting in the Gaza Strip against the Hamas terror group. 

The startup has raised over 7,000 shekels (approx. $1,884) since then, and has used the funds to supply the organization with vegetables and other ingredients needed for these meals. Over 600 meals have been distributed to the soldiers in the last three weeks. 

“We continuously try to find new ways of helping out,” Fischer Toubol says. 

“There is a real demand for such an app from both the businesses and the customers. And it’s good for businesses, good for customers, and good for the environment.”

The post App ‘Rescues’ Unsold Food, Saving Cash, Cafés And The Planet appeared first on NoCamels.

“Our oceans are running out of fish,” Sea2Cell co-founder and CEO Dr. Orna Harel tells NoCamels. “And the gap between supply and demand is increasing.” 

Harel explains that forecasts show the global demand for fish is expected to double by 2050, but even now the global fishing rate is almost three times higher than what our oceans can sustain. 

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization agrees with this data. The organization also warns that beyond the marine environment, overfishing threatens the billions of people around the world who rely on fish for protein as well as the millions of people for whom fishing is their principal livelihood.

Furthermore, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says that overfishing is closely linked to a phenomenon known as bycatch – when other forms of sea life are caught while catching certain species of fish. 

“This is a serious marine threat that causes the needless loss of billions of fish, along with hundreds of thousands of sea turtles and cetaceans,” the organization says.

Instead, the startup uses advanced cell-culturing technology to grow fish cells in a controlled environment inside large specialist tanks known as bioreactors. 

According to Harel, 40 percent of the protein that humans consume today comes from fish. And with the global population growing, so is the demand for cheap and healthy nutritional sources – including the protein, vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids that are found in fish.

The company’s proprietary technology allows the fish cells to divide at a fast rate that is suitable for industrial use. This, she says, means that the company can “produce fish products without catching any fish.”

While there are other companies that produce cultivated fish, Harel explains that Sea2Cell tackles several “bottlenecks” in the process that enables it to significantly reduce the cost of production. 

“One of the keys to making cultivated fish profitable is reducing the high cost of growth factors, expensive ingredients that must be added to the growth medium of the cells, and are important for the cells to divide and differentiate,” she explains.

“Sea2Cell is developing fish cells capable of secreting fish growth factors, therefore eliminating the need for adding these expensive ingredients.” 

The company, Harel tells NoCamels, also uses fast-dividing fish cell cultures, which coupled with its unique bioreactors and engineering system for increasing the volume of cells, allows it to mass produce the cultivated meat in a way that is economically viable. 

The startup plans to build its first pilot facility in 2026, with the intention of launching its first product the following year.

As well as partnering with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Yissum tech transfer company, Sea2Cell has received funding from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the high-tech sector, and operates as part of the Fresh Start foodtech incubator based in the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona. 

But the city, which is located just 2km from the border with Lebanon, was evacuated following the massive October 7 terror attack by Hamas in southern Israel and subsequent outbreak of war. 

The decision by the Israeli government to evacuate communities near the border came when the Lebanese-based terror group Hezbollah began targeting the area with missile strikes in what it said was solidarity with Hamas. 

The evacuation made it “impossible” for the company to operate in its own labs, Harel says, and its work on developing the advanced technology required a specialist environment.  

“We had to quickly adapt and come up with solutions that would allow us to continue our work,” she recalls. Now, however, the company has found a new temporary home that allows its development to continue.   

Aside from reducing the need for fishing in already stressed waters, Harel says that the company’s produce can have a positive impact on the environment and extreme climate change. 

The Sea2Cell cultivated fish, she says, can provide a reliable and healthy source of fish meat that is free of mercury and other heavy metals, as well as microplastics, antibiotics and other pollutants. 

“As we fish, we’re also polluting the oceans with plastics, dangerous chemicals, and toxins that, in turn, are contaminating the fish that we eat,” Harel warns. 

“Without healthy marine ecosystems, we will lose food security.”   

The post Fish Without Fishing: Cultivated Meat Startup Tackles Sea Scarcity appeared first on NoCamels.

Managing a water utility, be it in a bustling city or sparsely populated rural area, ultimately means ensuring that homes have access to water when they turn on a tap, TaKaDu CEO and founder Amir Peleg tells NoCamels.

But getting the water to the tap involves a complex series of steps, all of which are vulnerable to what Peleg terms “operational events.”

“Obviously infrastructure ages, and you do not necessarily see all the infrastructure because it’s underground,” he explains. 

The Yehud-based company devised its own software-driven system of data-gathering sensors placed on the infrastructure, which it calls “central event management.” And that method has now been introduced in countries all over the world. 

Traditionally, the maintenance of water utilities is carried out in “firefighting mode,” and is very reactive, Peleg says. TaKaDu, on the other hand, takes a more proactive approach. 

He gives the example of a geyser suddenly erupting in the middle of a street, which requires urgent handling and most likely extensive infrastructure work.  

The TaKaDu system, he says, could have identified that geyser as a more straightforward leak when it started a month or even half a year earlier, and when dealing with it would have required a less costly and complex repair operation.  

“If you manage the operation in [the right] way, you can actually optimize the way you work. Because you know how to prioritize things and you are less surprised. Then you have less firefighting… and everything is more manageable,” he says. 

“You need to understand when it starts and how big it is, who is in charge and whether it is high priority or low priority.” 

The data gathered by the sensors is delivered via cloud to a central dashboard where it is analyzed using AI, processed and flagged for attention if necessary. Peleg compares the way in which the issues are presented to an email inbox, with problems that need attention all clearly laid out in order of urgency. 

 “You see the list of events; it’s easy to understand [where] you have a flow problem or a leak,” he says. “You see everything automatically.”  

The platform does not just detect an operational event, it also guides the network as it is managed, allocating staff to handle it through the centralized computer system. 

“The whole management functionality is crucial,” he says, as the swift resolution of issues is key to preventing water loss. 

“It is not just about using smart analytics to detect, but to package it in such a way that they will be able to communicate, make decisions, measure, understand and prioritize,” he says. 

This could be logging higher than expected water flow in a small neighborhood – an anomaly that indicates a probable leak, with the system determining its urgency. 

The repair work on that leak is also registered by TaKaDu, showing that the issue has been dealt with, how long it took and how much water was wasted.  

While there are a growing number of companies that take a software-led approach to managing water networks, Peleg says, he does not believe that TaKaDu has a direct competitor who can offer the same comprehensive management system.  

In most cases, he says, once customers start to use TaKaDu, they stay with it. 

“It’s a big thing,” he says. “It gives you full visibility.” 

The company had been due to feature as an example of Israeli environmental innovation at the COP28 summit in Dubai this month, but had to cancel due to the security situation in Israel following the terror attack carried out by the Hamas terror group on October 7. 

Using his own money, Peleg started the company in 2009, after selling an earlier venture – in an entirely different field – to Microsoft. 

Exploring new ideas, he realized the importance of sustainability and decided to focus on the water sector, where he could use his previous experience. 

“I spotted a huge need to apply analytics and software tools to bring efficiency to the water utilities,” he explains. 

“The issue of inefficiency in water networks is a major thing, and water loss around the world is estimated at 25 percent,” he says, adding that not only does this cost billions of dollars, it also wastes a valuable resource.  

With the software now in place in multiple locations, including Australia and Latin America, the company is looking at extending its reach to sewage and wastewater management. 

“We are expanding the product,” he says. “Making it better and faster.”  

The post Israeli AI Platform Spots Leaks, Saves Water Worldwide appeared first on NoCamels.

This should have been a feature solely about their innovation, but for Kenaf Ventures the world changed on October 7, when its home and business partner, Kibbutz Kfar Aza, was devastated in the Hamas massacre of Israeli communities near the Gaza border. It is impossible to discuss the company without addressing the tremendous loss it suffered, and the determination to move forward even as they grieve. 

Kenaf Ventures takes its name from the plant it cultivates, also known as Hibiscus Cannabinus. And CEO Asaf Ofer credits the innovation to Kenaf president and CTO Avishay Morag, who has worked in the field of agriculture for many years. 

“He understood the unique and amazing properties that this plant has, part of which is that it absorbs the highest amount of carbon dioxide, is very strong, very lightweight [and] very thermally and acoustically insulative,” Ofer tells NoCamels. 

So, Ofer explains, Morag wanted to take advantage of this versatility and began to think of how to utilize the different properties. 

The plant, which Ofer says grows in a multitude of climate conditions, can be harvested every four months and with the company’s know-how can achieve a higher yield per hectare – all of which makes it both a sustainable and cost-effective crop, suitable for use as a substitute raw material. 

“This is part of what’s unique about this plant,” he says. “Growing it is easy. It’s resilient towards a lot of the pesticides and it stands and it grows.”

The company’s proprietary method transforms the plant into a biomaterial that can be used as a substitute for plastics, building materials and more. And, just as importantly, due to its voluminous yield, quick growth rate and properties, it also absorbs high levels of carbon dioxide compared to other plant-based materials. 

The early incarnation of the company was created by Morag in 2012, but the startup as it exists today was founded in 2018, establishing its factory and fields at Kfar Aza. 

Those first six years were devoted to research and development, according to Ofer, and studying agricultural practices in multiple countries, including China, India, Spain and Australia. 

The research in the early days was carried out at the Israel Ceramic and Silicate Institute located at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and the company had financial backing from the Israel Innovation Authority, the branch of the government dedicated to promoting the Israeli high-tech sector on the international stage.

“We got to the point that the company now holds unique know-how and the IP of how to capture and store carbon dioxide in a natural way using the Kenaf, and [also] transform it into cost-effective biomaterials that replace and reduce polluting materials in specific industries – plastic, construction and insulation,” Ofer says. 

He gives the example of polystyrene, a raw material used in packaging and insulation and often known by its most famous brand name, Styrofoam. The Kenaf biomaterial, he explains, can be used as a viable, cost-effective substitute – something that has never been possible before. 

“Styrofoam is the most polluting material on our planet,” Ofer says. “It never disappears, it doesn’t biodegrade, and as far as we know no one succeeded until today to replace it. Because it’s basically air with amazing properties and zero price. You cannot compete with it. 

“This is why we haven’t seen many biomaterials until today: most of them are very expensive, which is one of the many challenges in adopting a new bio-based material. If today you can buy one ton of polypropylene for $800 and alternative bio-based plastic can cost more than double per ton, what company will adopt biomaterials?” 

But the Kenaf biomaterial, he says, can be produced as inexpensively as polystyrene and without environmental damage, and the same is true across the board. 

“All of our materials either have the same properties of the materials that they are replacing or better, at the same price or cheaper, and with a negative carbon footprint,” he says.  

This know-how has drawn interest from abroad, as many countries have tried unsuccessfully to reap the same results with kenaf as the Israeli company. 

Kenaf Ventures picked India for its foray into the international market and was on the cusp of a planned major expansion there when the attacks of October 7 occurred. 

Scores of people from the kibbutz were among the 1,400 people killed on that day, and many more are believed to be among the 240 others held captive in Gaza. 

The kibbutz is integral to the company, Ofer says. “They are part of our shareholders alongside the Kafrit Group, they are our strategic partners.”  

He refuses to discuss individual victims, due to the terrible toll of the massacre.

“We are talking about dozens of people that we lost. Dozens, not one or two. Because if it were one, you can talk about one person, but it’s the entire community,” he says. 

“Most of the people that we work with are either murdered, kidnapped or not functioning.”

The kibbutz and the Kenaf factory are still part of a closed military zone, and the company’s work is on hold. But, Ofer says, they will press on because any other option is inconceivable. 

“In one minute, it’s gone. That will not stop us, and we are not the only ones,” he says. “We don’t need to continue, we have to continue.” 

His motivation is twofold, he explains – the personal and the professional. 

From a professional perspective, Ofer believes he has a responsibility to the company’s employees, its partners, and to the work that they do. 

“We didn’t establish Kenaf Ventures just to make money. It’s a company that aims to do good for the world. We have a vision, we have a path and we need to accomplish it,” he says. 

Israeli startups that have a positive impact on the world cannot just disappear; they must thrive, Ofer reasons.  

He compares such startups to other innovations from Israel that are now worldwide institutions. These include Waze, which created the ubiquitous traffic navigation system and is today owned by Google, and M-Systems, the creators of the USB flash drive later acquired by SanDisk. 

“The companies with global orientation, we built our base of the pyramid here in Israel, which is the brain, the R&D, the initial market penetration, the initial business development, the initial strategic partnerships – but we aim globally.” 

Similarly, his own personal history compels him to keep pressing on. 

“I was born to pioneers who came from horror and built the country,” he says. 

“My grandfather, just before he passed away, was telling me that he’s happy that I and others are continuing the spirit of innovation to build the country and take it forward, and we shouldn’t stop. How can I stop?”

The post ‘We Keep Going’: Cleantech Firm Resolute After Hamas Horror appeared first on NoCamels.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.