ISRAELI FIRM STRIPS ALGAL BLOOMS OF TOXICITY, MAKES WATER POTABLE

An Israeli company has developed a solution to algal blooms that ruin water bodies worldwide, saying the product developed by BlueGreen Water Technologies makes the water not only clean but also potable, as what it did in February 2020 to the 4.4-square-kilometer Roodeplaat Dam Reservoir near Pretoria, South Africa.

In an article written by Naama Barak for ISRAEL 21c on May 11, 2020, she said blue-green algal blooms are toxic bacteria scientifically known as cyanobacterial blooms that happen when water bodies are contaminated and the photosynthesizing algae proliferate and take over all the resources in the lakes or reservoirs and ruin their ecosystem, sometimes even turning them into dead aquatic zones and making fish poisonous and the water toxic.

She said that the Israeli company, founded in 2014, turned existing algal blooms treatments into a more efficient, planet-friendly and easy-to-use solution in pellet form. “For years, it was common practice to work with algicides, specifically copper,” explains BlueGreen’s CEO and co-founder Eyal Harel. “It is excellent material, it works great. But it’s a heavy metal that sticks around – it mounts up and in the end it’s a chemical. In the past 25 years a new algicide based on hydrogen peroxide was introduced. It also does a great job, but it is hydrogen peroxide. The way it’s being used today requires a very, very great deal of it.”

“We took the same chemical materials,” Harel explained, “and in a very clever procedure we gave them a nano-coating with a material that we developed using a process that we developed. It doesn’t do anything to the physical substances but it changes their physical properties. We took a heavy substance that quickly sinks and disintegrates when you put it in water and we turned it into a ‘light’ substance.’ The final result is that it floats atop the water and slowly releases the active material.”