U.S. Water News Online
JERUSALEM -- Environmental groups have criticized Israel for its plan to begin dumping treated wastewater from factories into the Mediterranean Sea.
For decades, factories have been dumping untreated effluents into the Kishon River, which empties into the Mediterranean. But the Environment Ministry has placed a ban on dumping effluents into the river.
As part of a master plan to clean up the polluted river, a pipe is to be built that will bypass the river and allow the factories to dump wastewater containing certain types of salts directly to the Mediterranean.
The ministry is currently conducting environmental impact surveys to determine the length of the pipe and a best location to minimize any potential harm to the sea.
``Only a sea pipe will help us achieve our goal: an end to the pollution of the Kishon River,'' Environment Minister Tzahi Hanegbi said in a release.
Officials at the ministry believe that ``releasing the effluent into the depths of the sea will not damage the quality of the sea water,'' the statement said.
But environmental groups sharply criticized the decision, saying the ministry had not done enough research to determine possible harm to sea flora and fauna.
In addition, factories that will be discharging the treated wastewater through the pipe have previously violated environmental controls on air pollution, the groups said.
``There are organic wastes, poisons, and metals in that water'' put out by the factories, said a spokeswoman for Israel's branch of the environmental group Greenpeace, Sharon Shemesh-Rosenbaum. ``We don't trust the factories to let only salts flow through the pipe into the sea.''
About 700,000 cubic feet of untreated water were being dumped into the river every day before the ban took effect, Shemesh-Rosenbaum said.
Currently, all wastewater must be treated before it is discharged into the river.
The chairman of The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, Michael Lifshitz, urged the ministry to force the factories to treat all their wastewater, which he said, even after treatment, ``is not clean enough to be dumped into the environment, neither the river nor the sea.''
The push to clean up the Kishon began in 2000 when it was revealed that 40 out of 750 divers of an elite navy unit had contracted cancer after carrying out diving exercises in the river.
The Kishon River and Haifa Bay are lined with chemical factories, which have been dumping their waste into the waterway for decades.
Greenpeace also criticized Israel for allowing the heavy pollution of the Yarkon River in Tel Aviv, which also flows into the Mediterranean Sea.
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