Israeli car engine could halve fuel costs, emissions

By David Shamah for The Times of Israel

Aquarius’s new take on internal combustion engines will be the big leap forward that vehicles need, says company founder

The notoriously conservative car business – autos, after all, are still largely powered by the internal combustion engine, developed nearly 150 years ago – is in for big changes, according to Gal Fridman, chief marketing officer and co-founder of Aquarius Engines.

“Our enhanced engine design uses energy much more efficiently, and eliminates the valves and rods that cause energy loss,” he said. “If a car equipped with a modern standard internal combustion engine can go about 600 kilometers on a tank of gas, ours can more than double that.”

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How One Jewish Mother Inspired a Global Eco-Revolution

By Aron Hirt-Manheimer for ReformJudaism.org

When I first visited Lotan, a Reform kibbutz in the Negev Desert, and witnessed the community’s artful integration of ancient and modern building methods, I asked founding member Alex Cicelsky how Lotan had become an internationally recognized center for ecological experimentation and training.

It all started 20 years ago, he said, when one kibbutz member’s mother came to visit him from a town north of London, where she grew organic vegetables in her small backyard. Dismayed by the sight of food scraps discarded into trash bins in the kibbutz communal kitchen, she complained: How can an intentional community built on Jewish values not be composting?

Lotan’s members took the complaint to heart and decided to recycle all of their waste.

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Eurovision Contestants Plant Trees in Israel

By KKL-JNF for JPost.com

 Twenty young singers from different countries in Europe, who are taking part in Eurovision 2016, arrived in Israel for a short visit. On Tuesday, April 12, they enjoyed the experience of planting trees at the KKL-JNF Tree Planting Center in The President's-Tzora Forest.

“It was a thrilling sensation to feel the earth in my hands and plant a tree,” said Rykka from Switzerland. “I was surprised to see how green Israel is. I was expecting to see a desert, and here we are, standing in a forest.”

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Phresh Organics

Phresh is a company that produces and sells strictly organic, non-toxic preservatives by means of micro encapsulation of essential oils. We use technology that was developed for over 12 years in Ben Gurion University and the University of Florida.

Currently, we focus on organic preservatives for fruits and vegetables, hoping to drastically reduce food wastes at home. Together, we can make the world greener, more sustainable, and enjoy more yummy fruits and vegetables!

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Tips for an Eco-Friendly Passover

Tips from the Chicago Botanic Garden

Enriching Your Holidays

Each year more families “go green” by incorporating environmentally sound practices into their Passover celebration. Here at the Chicago Botanic Garden, we have some tips for making your holiday eco-friendly. We hope one of ways you’ll commemorate this season of renewal is to visit the Garden with your family, to see how the earth is gloriously rejuvenating itself within our 24 individual gardens and four natural areas.

Spring’s promise of renewal fits in with the Passover theme, as the story of Exodus tells how Jews were released from slavery and left Egypt, determined to renew themselves as a people. The Passover seder, centered around food and rich with symbols, is a special time for families to gather and remember by retelling the story in a traditional format (seder means “order”). But, as with so many other holidays, commercialism has encroached upon the sacred nature of Passover, which can also involve a fair amount of junk!

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For more Passover news, check out our    page.

Passover is just about here, check out our Passover Holiday Spotlight Kit

Life After Brisket

Veganism in Israel is taking hold among the Orthodox, who use textual sources to argue against all meat consumption

By Sara Toth Stub for Tablet Magazine   


A little more than two years ago, 36-year-old Jeremy Gimpel, a Modern Orthodox Israeli rabbi, political activist, and radio and television host, finally watched a YouTube video taken in a kosher-certified chicken slaughtering plant. A vegan friend had encouraged him for months to take a look at various videos about the ugly side of industrial food production. But Gimpel, who back then found vegans annoying, had dismissed his friend, pointing out that halakha not only allows for eating meat, but also prohibits the sort of animal torture that such slaughterhouse videos purported to show.

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After long haul, Knesset okays 10 agorot charge for plastic bags

Lawmakers unanimously pass law after two-year slog, but environmental activists warn tiny charge, down from original 40 agorot, won’t be enough to dissuade use

By Melanie Lidman and Raoul Wootliff for The Times of Israel

More than two years after giving an initial go-ahead, the Knesset passed a bill late Monday night imposing a charge on plastic bags at supermarkets and convenience stores, a move aimed at significantly reducing municipal waste and pollution.

The law, which will come into effect on January 1, 2017, will require customers to pay 10 agorot (approximately $0.03) per plastic bag and will ban the distribution of certain types of polymer bags.

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