During my time as editor and host of KALW Radio’s “What Works” series, our team brought you stories of trailblazing local leaders lifting up hard-hit Bay Area communities during the pandemic.
These solutions stuck with me and, this year, I was invited to the Israel Climate Change Conference at Ben-Gurion University and the OurCrowd Summit. My visit was part of the "Climate Change Technology, Innovations & Solutions" press tour organized by the Jerusalem Press Club. Israel is currently facing one of the biggest threats to its democracy as the government attempts to overhaul its judicial system and reduce the Supreme Court’s power. I arrived amid massive protests and escalating tensions, growing rapidly under the new far-right government that came into power in December.
The protest also made its way into the climate change conference on this university campus in the dusty Negev desert. Protestors and activists — who had traveled there from across Israel — chanted “shame on you,” at the new government’s recently-appointed environment minister the day after at least 100,000 protestors gathered in the capital city.
As Israel develops initiatives to tackle climate, health, and other global issues, the country has been scrutinized in the press for not extending its policies to all segments of the population, including on the environment, access to water, vaccines, and human rights.
I went to learn how activists and entrepreneurs are trying to spread their solutions to more people andnavigate these long-standing problems. I had an opportunity to interview women environmentalists and climate entrepreneurs who are working to pave the way to a greener future — from organizing global trash clean-ups to designing eco-friendly building tiles.
Launching a litter clean-up movement that spread globally
Ever seen a sign that says “Don’t Litter”? Sharona Shnayder is going way beyond not littering; she has energized young people across the planet to clean up trash in their communities, one week at a time.
She’s a Nigerian-Israeli environmental activist who someday plans to run for Prime Minister. At age 22, she’s already co-founded the Tuesdays for Trash movement, received mentoring from the Canadian ambassador to Israel, and works for a global company that generates clean energy in sub-Saharan Africa. She also interned at the Israeli cleantech start-up UBQ, which converts waste into reusable plastic.
As a Lagos-born, Portland-raised resident of Tel Aviv, Shnayder brings her international upbringing to her work. She grew closer to nature during her childhood in Nigeria, she says, by living in a place “where everything is really connected and you see the immediate impact of your actions on the environment.”
Years later in the U.S., Shnayder and a college friend conceived the idea for a trash clean-up during the pandemic. “What's the simplest thing we could do while also socially distancing?” Shnayder thought. “And, that was picking up trash. So, we decided to head out to the park, bring some trash bags, see what we could find and have a conversation while we were doing it. And we were really surprised by how quickly we filled our bags of trash.”
After picking up litter on a Tuesday, Shnayder decided to give it a name that would stick — Tuesdays for Trash. Inspired by the young Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who spread her message on social media, Shnayder also turned to Instagram and Facebook as a tool to gather momentum and encourage friends to join her.
Since then Tuesdays for Trash has grown tremendously. “We've been able to establish 11 chapters with participants in 36 countries and we've removed over 30,000 pounds of trash, which is mind-blowing to me, because literally it started just two people picking up trash at the university,” she says.
Shnayder immigrated to her father’s home country of Israel in 2021, and is deeply involved in environmental activism, continuing her weekly trash clean-ups on the beaches of the Mediterranean city of Tel Aviv. She says she’s guided by the Jewish concept of “Tikkun Olam,” which in Hebrew means “repair the world.”
“If we're not keeping the land clean and making sure our environment is healthy, then we're not respecting it,” she says. “I think it's really important for it to be a part of every aspect of life in this country.”
"If we're not keeping the land clean and making sure our environment is healthy, then we're not respecting it."Sharona Shnayder
The majority of the Tel Aviv beach trash consists of plastics, Shnayder says, pointing to the high consumption of the material. “A lot of research has shown that thecoastline of the Mediterranean in Israel is the most polluted in the entire sea for microplastics, which is really, really scary, especially knowing that plastic has only been around like 50 years.”
She’s also highly aware of Israel’s position in the Middle East. “Arabs are not having the same access to resources as everyone else. And I think that needs to stop because climate justice has to be for everyone,” she says, explaining that access to water is a major issue.
Shnayder says her own experience as a Black woman living in the U.S. gave her insight into what it feels like to be oppressed. “I really recognize what it's like to be in the minority and to have people of privilege just not take action, not recognize the situation.”
Now that she belongs to a group she says holds more privilege, she aims to spread environmental initiatives across borders, religions, and ethnic groups. “Being an Israeli and also a Jewish person, I really understand the privilege we have. The climate crisis knows no borders,” she says. “It's going to affect everybody, so it's in our best interest to work together and make sure that everybody can survive.”
"The climate crisis knows no borders. It's going to affect everybody."Sharona Shnayder
“At the end of the day, we all want the same things: we want a place to call home, we want clean water, we want a home that isn't on fire,” she says. “And I think that the climate crisis and environmentalism is the perfect common ground to be able to work on these issues and be able to find peace through justice.”
Shnayder fears Israel’s new right-wing government will have major repercussions.
“It’s terrifying because it feels very, very much like a repeat of the Trump administration in a lot of ways,” she says. “This right-wing government, I think that they're more focused on power than anything else. It's not really about making lasting change or positive change in general.”
She points out the environment is at stake, citing an example of the new government’s repeal of the plastic tax. “The [new] environment minister … doesn't understand the impacts of the actions that she's making right now because it's setting us back so far,” she says.
She’s hopeful that her efforts — alongside the growing number of people who have joined her clean-up movement — can help change things, even if it takes time. “If the planet isn't healthy, we're not healthy,” Shnayder says, adding “it's just important to start recognizing where the problems are and how you can be part of the solution, which eventually will lead to a more sustainable future.”
Leading a climate team to push for greener waste facilities
In the northern part of the country, Keren Shahar is a 23-year-old environmental leader working on climate issues with “Israel 2050.” It’s a citizen-led activist group dedicated to a range of causes — from improving public transportation to reducing landfill waste. Shahar started as a mentee and now, two years later, heads up the climate team for the org’s chapter in Haifa, northern Israel.
Shahar’s main focus is finding ways to fix her country’s massive waste problem. That’s a major responsibility in a nation where recycling is limited andlandfills are running out of space.
“There's this plan of the Environmental Ministry that instead of sending 80% of waste to landfills and recycling 20%, to make it upside down and send 20% to a landfill and 80% recycling,” Shahar says.
It’s a large task, especially because of a slow-moving bureaucracy and elected leaders that hesitate to make sweeping changes, she says. On top of that, “the local municipalities don't want to have factories that take care of this waste and make it energy and make gas,” she adds. “They're not doing that because of NIMBY — ‘Not in my backyard.’”
But, she’s steadfast in her commitment to push for government action. Her first goal: getting Israel’s environmental ministry to tap into a large, unused fund that’s been set aside to take care of waste. Shahar is drafting a plan for the government to make that happen.
“I've been in this conversation with this little office in the Treasury,” Shahar says, “and they want to build a facility that takes care of organic trash in the region. They said to us, ‘we need your help with the NIMBY problem. We need you to campaign. We need you to help us in that matter because we can't do it alone.’”
"When one woman makes an impact, other women can make an impact too."Keren Shahar
Shahar’s climate activism began early on in life — she became a full vegan in the 10th grade and gained even more interest in the food waste issue during her compulsory military service. “I saw how much paper we throw away and how much food is wasted in the dining room,” she says. It didn’t take her long to play an important part in her country’s environmental movement.
“As a woman, sometimes it's a bit harder to be in that position of being an idealist because it's easier not to listen to a woman,” she says, adding “when one woman makes an impact, other women can make an impact too.”
Women leaders rising in the clean tech start-up world
Adital Ela says a cup of Indian chai sparked her idea for designing natural building materials. On a trip to India, she stopped by a tea stall for piping hot chai served in a clay cup. She noticed the locals tossing their empty clay cups into a pile, where it was absorbed back into the earth. She then had an epiphany: why not use this approach to create an eco-friendly, sustainable replacement for cement used in construction?
“You have this shortest and purest circularity from earth to functional product back to earth; no recycling, no collection systems,” Ela says. “I had an inner voice within me say, ‘one day I will build an industry based on that purity, and use a technological and scientific approach to allow these kind of products to be relevant in the modern industrial world.’”
With that vision and a deep background in design and sustainability, Ela founded Criaterra Innovations. It’s a start-up that’s developed a zero-waste method of producing biodegradable wall tiles and building products made of all-natural substances.
Through her work, Ela discovered that her own grandmother — who lived in Iraq — built earth ovens in the same traditional, sustainable way that inspired Criaterra’s technology. The company’s products are made from a variety of silts, clays, sands, vegetal fibers, and a variety of oils, resins, and minerals.
Their manufacturing process reduces energy consumption by 90 percent, a significant shift towards lowering carbon emissions. They do this by cranking manufacturing temperatures all the way down to under 100 degrees Celsius — below the boiling point of water — instead of the 1600 degrees Celsius heat used in traditional cement factories.
That’s especially important since regular cement production accounts for a sizable chunk of emissions, says Criaterra’s Chairperson Daphna Wiener. “If you’re looking at the overall climate, the carbon emissions of cement alone is about 8 percent,” she says.
On a behind-the-scenes tour of their R&D production headquarters in Holon, just outside Tel Aviv, I saw technicians hard at work creating a soft, doughy mixture that they bake into tiles of warm earth tones. As a small, growing company, the tiles have so far been installed in about 100 buildings, mostly in Israel and Europe, one in Hong Kong, and coming soon to the United States.
“The first product that we designed was the hex tile and this was designed to give the story of the technology life on the wall in a visual way,” Ela says. They patterned the hexagonal tile after the shape of a molecule of clay, and it also mimics the shape found between cracks in a large field of dry earth.
Criaterra also had to overcome the hurdles faced by women-run companies — since hidden biases and discrimination remain pervasive in the venture capital (VC) world when raising funds, the team says. “Every woman founder has a story,” Wiener says, “and when you add up these stories, it becomes compelling.” Last year, woman-founded start-ups in the U.S. received less than 2 percent of all VC funding, a figure that increased to 17 percent with a male co-founder.
“We had people doubting if we, as women, can lead a company like this, asking when a man would become the CEO of the company,” Ela says. “Others are more extreme and not respectful, but mainly it’s the subtleness you can hear that people don’t give you the entire credit you deserve that this can be done.”
"There are certainly fantastic technologies led by women that are under-funded, and that’s where the opportunity is."Daphna Wiener
Wiener encourages funders to look at the merit of companies when deciding what to fund, rather than following the crowd. “You want to find those under-served opportunities because that’s where the growth can be,” she says. “There are certainly fantastic technologies led by women that are under-funded, and that’s where the opportunity is.”
Criaterra’s leaders say women-run start-ups are resilient and determined, and a balance of women in the clean tech start-up world is necessary to drive innovation forward. “Women bring an additional way of approaching things,” Ela says, “and it makes the ecosystem more interesting, more varied, and richer. Those [funders] that are open to that are the right partners. There are many statistics that show it’s a good investment and that women-led companies are very successful.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following corrections have been made to the story since publication:
- Context was added to note that the reporter's visit was part of the "Climate Change Technology, Innovations & Solutions" press tour organized by the Jerusalem Press Club.
- Clarification that Tuesdays for Trash has 11 chapters with participants in 36 countries.
- A caption on an image that previously said Trash for Tuesdays was updated to the correct name of the organization, Tuesdays for Trash.
