Early every Friday morning on my way to buy challot for Shabbat, I have for years dutifully stopped at the Jerusalem Municipality’s recycling bin behind Yad Sarah’s headquarters to deposit the large number of newspapers that I read and accumulate as a journalist.
A few weeks ago as I was doing this, a Sanitation Department employee emptying the green garbage bin full of regular refuse told me, “You are wasting your time. All the garbage from the city’s recycling bins for paper, plastic, metal, and glass – and even batteries – are mixed together with the regular garbage to bring to the GreenNet recycling plant in Atarot in the north of the city, where everything is sorted automatically. So put it all in the regular bin near your house.”
A bit incredulous, I began to investigate. The office of municipal spokesman Daniel Ohayon declared: “It’s not true. Jerusalemites should continue to sort their garbage and deposit it in the recycling bins.” When I asked to interview a senior city official who is in charge of recycling, I was turned down several times and told to “just write what we have said.”
Suspicious, I found the phone number of GreenNet, reached the executive offices, and was told officially that “we really do sort everything. Jerusalemites can throw everything into the bin near their homes. We do the work. It is all separated without human contact into various types – aluminum, iron, paper, and organic materials that are sold to customers in Israel and around the world.”
GreenNet said that it is “fully owned by the Y.S. Jacobi Brothers Group. Our plant sorts and treats all municipal waste from over a million residents of the Jerusalem metropolitan area. The facility’s absorption capacity is approximately 2,000 tons of waste per day, which is sorted using our unique systems into types of plastic, paper, metals, non-metals, and organic waste.”
I NEVER did like the recycling bins. Many of them are dirty, smelly, and ugly, with graffiti on them; many people leave bottles, cans, plastic containers, and other objects next to them instead of inside, thinking that some people make money from collecting them. Broken glass is often left on the pavement. The bins take up precious space on the sidewalks; and when the large garbage trucks come to narrow streets and raise them into the air to unload them, they stop traffic for several minutes at each bin. And the gasoline for these trucks and salaries for their drivers and workers must be paid.
In recent months, as I walk early every morning for an hour with my dog, I have checked the recycling bins and seen that most of them are almost empty – not because they are emptied by the men in the trucks all the time but apparently because Jerusalemites have heard that the sorting is done for all garbage in Atarot.
We used to have two large green garbage bins next to our building, with collection every other day. Suddenly, the city took one away, explaining that the trucks would now arrive daily. It seemed to me like a waste of gasoline and manpower.
Asked several times to comment, and still adamantly refusing to allow interviews as if the issue involved secrets of the General Security Services (Shabak), the municipal spokesman stated: “We categorically reject the claim that the recycling collection containers are empty. As a matter of fact, the data on separated waste indicates cooperation from the city’s residents and the success of the source separation process. About seven tons of glass is collected in just one collection route, approximately 20 tons of packaging are collected weekly, and about 60 tons of cardboard are collected weekly.”
IN ACCORDANCE with the Packaging Law, the municipality is obligated to separate packaging waste at source and not to separate it at transit stations, the spokesman’s office continued. “GreenNet serves as a supplementary layer in the recycling process and does not constitute a substitute for source separation,” the spokesman’s office said.
“The municipality operates with full transparency and even allows guided tours of the GreenNet station, which is not intended for the exchange of paper, glass, and electronic waste. Source separation ensures higher recycling quality, and this is the policy preferred by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the municipality.”
When Jerusalem stopped sorting garbage
However, in 2019 – six years ago – the weekly Jerusalem paper Kol Ha’ir reported that “in the past two weeks, the municipality has begun to evacuate the bottle-and-paper recycling facilities, which are located in neighborhoods throughout the city. The reason is that this is a municipal move because Atarot’s GreenNet waste separation plant is responsible for recycling all waste of Jerusalemites, thereby, the municipality claims, freeing up areas throughout the city where the recycling facilities were located for other uses.
“In fact, the Jerusalem Municipality is the first in Israel to discontinue the model that exists in many cities around the world – in which residents themselves separate their waste and throw it into designated recycling facilities,” the report said. “According to the new-old model, all garbage is thrown into one bag, without the need to separate waste and recycle, which will ultimately end up at the Atarot waste separation plant.”
The Kol Ha’ir article continued, saying that “the Jerusalem Municipality confirmed the details to us this week and stated that the garbage is diverted to the GreenNet recycling site, one of the most advanced in the country, where the garbage is sorted and transferred for recycling. There are 50 recycling centers spread throughout the city. Recently, some of the collection containers for recycling paper and bottles were removed from areas where there are recycling centers anyway, in order to improve the appearance of the city and the public space.”
The weekly paper concluded by quoting the Environmental Protection Ministry, which stated that it “is not aware of any changes made by the Jerusalem Municipality. According to the law, the municipality is obligated to separate waste for recycling based on the Waste Collection and Removal Law for Recycling, the Packaging Law, and the Electronic Waste Law.”
Confused? So am I. In the meantime, I am throwing my newspapers into the bin next to my house, and I have filed a complaint against the municipality with the State Ombudsman, demanding that it provide a detailed explanation of what is really going on.