Twestival Jerusalem ‘09 and three Israeli water technology companies to watch

February 23, 2009 by Lisa Damast
Filed under: Cleantech, Environment, Uncategorized

Disclosure: The following is partially a recap of Twestival Jerusalem ‘09, an event that I helped organize.

In a recent post about Green Any Site, I mentioned that Jerusalem took part in a worldwide effort to raise money for Charity: Water in Africa. The event, a Twestival (short for Twitter festival), raised over NIS 2000 in Jerusalem for Charity: Water, which will use this money and the money raised from the over 200 other Twestivals around the world (over $250,000 USD) to build wells that will provide clean water to villages in Africa and India.

As Israel is a leader in water technology and several of the co-organizers’ organizations, including Jewish Climate Initiative, Green Any Site, PresenTense and GreenProphet are connected to cleantech in some way, Twestival Jerusalem took on an additional component of educating attendees on clean technology and water technology from Israel.

Some Israeli water technology companies that stand out when addressing water needs, in Africa and elsewhere, include Desalitech, AqWise and Netafim. Here is what each company is doing:

Desalitech: Desalitech has created a reverse osmosis water treatment technology that can lower desalinated water prices to a level that will make water affordable to developed and developing areas. It’s desalination technology offers reductions of up to 50% in the installation costs of desalination plants and in desalination energy consumption as well as a reduction in maintanence and operating expenses. It’s surface and ground water reclamation technology is currently bringing clean water to villages in Africa and abroad.

AqWise: Aqwise is an innovator in developing and implementing wastewater treatment technologies that can be used in municipal, agricultural and industrial wastewater treatement plants. Its AGAR^® Process can be used for both organic carbon and nutrient removal. At the heart of the process are little plastic biomass carriers that filter and treat the water in a similar manner to the way rocks filter water.

Netafim: Netafim has been around since 1965 and is one of Israel’s first innovators in the agriculture sector. Aside from greenhouse and bio-energy solutions, it provides irrigation solutions and products that enable customers to get the most from their crops (both in quality and yields) while using as minimal an amount as possible of valuable resources, such as water.