From Edible Bugs to Urban Forests, Israeli Climate Tech Is Saving the Environment
Most people cringe at the thought of trash-eating bugs, yet an Israeli start-up, FreezeM, is reimagining them as a lucrative and potentially delicious way to address climate change. As energy, food, and water become some of the world’s dilemmas, FreezeM recently showed off its bug-based protein that efficiently feeds the world without increasing carbon emissions while processing organic waste.
“With our current production, we can convert 100,000 tons of (organic) waste per year into 6,000 tons of protein for animal feed,” said Yuval Gilad, a co-founder and CEO of FreezeM, a startup that creates accessible insect farming for protein production and waste management.
Speaking with The Media Line during the annual Tel Aviv PLANETech World 2024 conference for climate entrepreneurs, scientists, and industry leaders, Gilad said, “For us, it’s clear that you can take our larvae, feed and grow them, and create insect-based ice cream or flour. Our product can support that. It’s only a question of the market. Is the market ready? Will the customers accept it or not?”
We think that, right now, the major impact will be on animal feed because animals don’t mind eating insects. So you don’t have this same market barrier, and you can impact the food industry very fast by feeding animals with the most sustainable protein source.
Gilad continued: “We think that, right now, the major impact will be on animal feed because animals don’t mind eating insects. So you don’t have this same market barrier, and you can impact the food industry very fast by feeding animals with the most sustainable protein source.”
TreeTube, another exhibitor at PLANETech World 2024, is also demonstrating how environmental technologies are helping Israel and contributing to the region and the world. TreeTube makes large-scale, easy-to-manage tree-planting solutions that help cities become more resilient to extreme weather conditions.
Jonathan Antebi, TreeTube co-founder and VP of business development, described the company’s technology as a modular system that enables tree growth under pavement and sidewalks. According to Antebi, this system is almost like considering urban trees as another city utility with cables underground.
“We’re constructing urban forests. Trees provide shade, reduce temperatures, save energy, and [provide] many other benefits. Also, close to 30% of street trees fail to grow under paved areas. These areas are compacted with dense utilities and covered with asphalt and concrete. Now the results are continuous replacement and replanting, and we end up with no trees because they cannot grow and are a huge waste of public funds,” Antebi told The Media Line.
One could say that TreeTube is literally “groundbreaking” if it weren’t for the fact that their technology also protects sidewalks from roots that grow and break the pavement on the ground. “This technology is patented and allows the perfect load bearing, which is very good next to every traffic, or near to trams. It is already installed in the Netherlands, in the Baltics, and in Estonia, and we are now looking for projects in the US as well,” Antebi detailed.
“Installation only depends on the pace of the excavation. We are talking about between 8 to 15 units per day. A recent study indicated in order to fix the global warming situation as it is now, you need to plant in the US only in urban streets more than 30 million trees each year. This is the only solution to industrial Plantation nowadays. No other way of doing it,” he added.
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According to Noam Sonennberg, the director of PLANETech World 2024, there is a reason why so many Israeli-based climate tech startups succeed. “One of the advantages of the Israelis in this industry is the way we create multidisciplinary teams,” he told The Media Line. “Almost every solution in climate needs to have it. To combine software and hardware or to combine biochemistry with artificial intelligence. We can do that.”
“We’re in a race to net zero (carbon emissions). We have to do it, and technology is a must-take road in this race. We must move faster. The bigger players need to join it. We’re just at the beginning of this summer, and we’ll see more and more of these extreme temperatures; if we want to stop it, we must invest much more now,” Sonennberg explained. “We’re all about solving the climate crisis, but we also want people to make good money out of it. All the incentives must be aligned. It’s a great business opportunity, and it’s the right thing to do.”
Considering how pressing environmental problems are in the Middle East and North Africa, Anne Baer, the CEO of iKare Innovation, a leading international business developer and facilitator connecting Israeli tech to the rest of the world, explained how the Jewish state’s climate tech can work as a bridge to normalizing relations with countries in the region.
Wherever the [Israeli] foreign minister and the prime minister go, they bring a ‘basket’ of technologies that their hosts need. We hear about security and defense and less about health, food, and climate, but these vital topics are definitely in this basket.
“Wherever the [Israeli] foreign minister and the prime minister go, they bring a ‘basket’ of technologies that their hosts need. We hear about security and defense and less about health, food, and climate, but these vital topics are definitely in this basket,” she explained to The Media Line.
“In the Abraham Accords, there are vertical agreements that are signed, and a lot has to do with defense, definitely, but also with health since we were in the middle of COVID when the Abraham Accords were devised. But also a lot has to do with feeding populations,” Baer continued.
Commenting on how the Abraham Accords paved the way for Israeli tech to bring sustainability to Morocco, Baer said: “Morocco is a much poorer country that has to deal with poverty levels of almost 50% of the population. This population needs to be fed, and this was definitely a part of the [Abraham Accords] agreement. Now, we can see that Israeli tech is winning tenders in agri tech, water tech, desert tech, and desalination in Morocco.”
The conference also addressed global warming and its impact on the Middle East. “This isn’t the era of global warming anymore. This is the era of global boiling. This summer and the past year have been the hottest ever. This is in addition to the war, the democracy crisis, and a lot of crises we’re in the midst of, here in Israel, in the Middle East, and the world,” former Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg, the head of the National Institute for Climate and Environmental Policy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told The Media Line.
According to Zandberg, “This conference is about taking the climate solutions, the climate tech, and the climate policy and to see how this ecosystem can take the solutions and make them feasible. The world is warming, and the Middle East is a hotspot. Israel has all the potential to help ourselves secure our national security, food security, and quality of living and contribute to the region and the world,” he further explained.
An essential aspect of Israel’s climate tech ecosystem is the role of its research centers. Dr. Isaac Meir, a professor of sustainable architecture at Ben-Gurion University with a diverse background of cooperation with Jordan, UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait, explained to The Media Line that “Israel is full of interesting startups, among them are ones that focus on solar energy, cogeneration, even appropriate construction systems. Yet the market uptake of such is slow, often tedious, and in some cases, exceptionally promising Israeli companies are bought by foreign companies and disappear. For example, Zenith Solar, whose products were an offshoot of a Ben Gurion University research.”
“Israel has had a long history of scientific relations with neighboring countries, even such with no official relations with us. Drip irrigation is, obviously, the first that comes to mind. I am sure solar energy companies have joint projects, and drylands adapted to sustainable agriculture have been a common ground for meetings and information exchange,” Dr. Meir said.
“The Ben-Gurion University massive open online course on environmental protection and sustainability has been able to reach out to relevant audiences in neighboring countries, not least because of subtitles in Arabic. Since we are all realizing that the challenges and dangers are common—climate change, desertification, faster warming in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East (EMME), rising morbidity and mortality, shrinkage of potentially arable lands, diminishing water resources,” Dr. Meir highlighted.
In many ways, the adoption of climate tech is mirroring the normalization of relations between Arab and Muslim countries and Israel. With global warming as humanity’s common enemy, and with Israel providing some of the best technology in the world to fight it, updating their relationship status with the Jewish state will be the only alternative for many countries.
Perhaps one of the most symbolic startups attending this year’s PLANETech World 2024 was FreezeM, with its bug-sourced protein that can be used for food or animal feed. However, because of people’s cultural barriers to eating insects, their protein source is used mainly for pet food.
The next sector is aquaculture because you can replace fish meal, which is a nonsustainable source of protein, in aquaculture. Later on, poultry farming, pig farming, and other animals will also be included.
Gilad, the CEO of FreezeM, told The Media Line that “the current consumers for insect protein are now the pet food market. There are over 40 brands of pet food based on insect protein. There were none two years ago.”
“The next sector is aquaculture because you can replace fish meal, which is a nonsustainable source of protein, in aquaculture. Later on, poultry farming, pig farming, and other animals will also be included,” he concluded.
Just like Muslim and Arab countries’ relations with Israel, acceptance of climate technologies that might be cultural taboos will now have to change or suffer the impacts of global warming.
