The unmistakable odour of decay announces the Dan region sanitation and solid waste disposal plant, where Mala Girshtein, Associate Engineer, extends a business card made of recycled paper before driving us to a hill for a look around. The ?hill? was actually the largest dump in Israel which had reached a height of 60 metres and stretched over an area of 450,000 metres. ?Tel Aviv and its neighbourhoods started to dump waste here 60 years ago. Now this is a modern transfer station where we get 3,000 tonnes of municipal waste per day, besides construction and demolition waste, to be processed,? she says, pointing to trucks?1,200 of them arrive every day?unloading waste into a facility where plastic and metal are separated before the garbage is processed further to weed out the rubble from green waste.
Here, at the Hiriya Landfill Project, located between Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv, everything is recycled and no resource goes unutilised, with man and machine working together to reuse refuse?be it the water used to wash the garbage trucks that goes into a wetland to be treated for use in gardening, or methane from the now-covered dump which is tapped from the ground by 70 wells and used to electrify the plant as well as sold to a textile factory four km away. High-calorie waste such as wood is shredded and supplied to the cement industry for use as a cleaner solid fuel, and construction waste is put to good use in laying roads.
With a pilot recycling plant that can process 200 tonnes of waste a day, the plant treats 25 per cent of Israel?s waste. ?The dumping stopped in 2000. Ten years later, we will build the country?s largest recycling plant and this site will be transformed into a park,? says Mala, showing us into the environmental educational centre. ?It was once a compost factory,? she says. It has a caf? where children with special needs make ?green? coffee. It?s a house of learning and an activity centre for people interested in environmentally-friendly living.