Israeli dump turns to education, not contamination

HIRIYA, Israel (Reuters Life!) - For 50 years, Israelis endured the foul odor of a landfill that towered over the approach to Tel Aviv's international airport and served as the dumping grounds for most of Israel's household trash.

Now, nine years after the last garbage truck emptied its load on the 60-metre- (200 foot) high plateau, the soil-covered Hiriya dump has shed its smell and become home to an environmental education centre and trash recycling facilities.

"Hiriya will never rise again," said Idit Alhasid, the education centre's manager.

Thousands of schoolchildren a year now make field trips to the converted dump to learn how to help save the planet.

At the site, visitors get to see how construction material is turned into gravel, pruned branches into mulch, and household garbage into clean-burning gas. They can also climb the garbage mountain and overlook Tel Aviv's sprawling metropolis.

"Because we are located within Israel's largest garbage recycling and transfer centre, the issues are very much connected. We can see these things with our own eyes, and this centre is here to put them into practice," Alhasid said.

In the spirit of recycling, children pay an entrance fee of four plastic bottles to see how the containers, crushed beverage cans, plastic bags and inner tubes can be transformed into chairs, benches and curtains.

Alhasid said she hopes that one day visitors will be able to bring to the centre's "material reuse" room a household item destined for the trash bin and transform it into something they would want to bring back home.

The landfill mountain is also a centerpiece of a new public park on the outskirts of Tel Aviv named after former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who suffered a stroke in January 2006, and has been in a coma since.

Doron Sapir, head of Dan Association of Towns, the body in charge of solid waste disposal in Tel Aviv's metropolitan area, sees the recycling park as "part of a social-environmental concept that is going to lead us into the future".

"We are hoping to get as many recycling facilities as possible," Sapir said, looking ahead to using the former garbage dump as a proving ground for new "green technologies" that will be both profitable and environmentally friendly.

But despite the efforts to make Hiriya an example, Gilad Ostrovsky, a recycling expert at the Israeli Union for Environmental Defense, says that Israel still ranks poorly compared to Western countries, with only 15 percent of household trash being recycled.

(Writing by Avida Landau, Editing by Paul Casiato)