My wife Gail, daughter Michelle and I are on a long overdue trip to Israel. We have visited many ancient religious sites, museums, open air markets (Souq) both in the old and new cities of Jerusalem. So what caught my attention the most? The communal street side recycling bins for both paper and plastic.
Jerusalem does not yet have citywide curbside recycling. While there is a new recycling center that you can take your recycling to, it is underutilized. (See the Jerusalem Post article about it here)
As you might expect for the Middle East, Jerusalem is hot! Everyone carries bottles of water, soda, juice and other liquids to stay hydrated. In the U.S. there usually is no place to recycle plastic bottles while out in public. My family holds onto them until we can get home and put them in our recycling bin. But here in Jerusalem, they have taken a different approach. Every few blocks there are big wire mesh cages with different bottle size holes in them. Jerusalem residents (and tourists) do not have to go far to recycle those empty plastic bottles.
The same goes with newspapers. There are over twenty-two daily newspapers in Israel, a country with only 7.6 million people. Add to this all of the weekly papers including political, sports, and foreign language and you have a large amount of material to recycle. Again, due to the lack of curbside recycling (I think that it might be impossible to get a truck down some of these narrow streets) Jerusalem has taken a communal approach by installing large paper recycling drums, which are located every few blocks. After years of complaints about how ugly they look and the difficulty of putting anything other than newsprint in them, Jerusalem is now rolling out sleek blue boxes for curbside recycling that will accept all types of paper or cardboard! To find out more about Jerusalem’s new paper recycling systems read Jerusalemite’s article here.
My family agrees that there is much less litter in Jerusalem than many cities we have visited, both in the U.S. and overseas. It is a pleasure to wander its tree-lined streets armed with the knowledge that you can recycle that empty plastic bottle just about anywhere down the street.
Here is some pictures of recycling in Jerusalem, Enjoy!
