Amid shutdown threat, campaign tries to paint polluting Haifa industries green
‘Without industry, there is no Haifa,’ says slogan from a new social media campaign claiming that emissions are down and seeking to shift blame for pollution
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
Amid a growing consensus that polluting factories should be shut down or moved out of Haifa Bay in northern Israel, a public relations campaign has been launched to hit back in recent days.
Under the slogan, “Without industry, there is no Haifa,” which rhymes in Hebrew, and with the hashtag, “The Truth about Haifa,” the campaign on Facebook and Twitter charges that “industry is greener.”
Without providing data, it says that emissions have dropped by between 41 and 80 percent in recent years, and that taken together, the facilities in Haifa Bay contribute just 8% to the area’s environmental damage, compared with 76% by marine traffic and 15% by transport on land.
Another message (in the tweet below) calls on the public to join the campaign in order to “save” the city.
The campaign, which does not disclose who is behind it, comes two months after a watershed announcement by the head of the National Economic Council, which advises the prime minister, that the Bazan oil refineries that have long polluted Haifa, and largely defined its skyline, must be shut down within five years and replaced with a modern, green high-tech and residential hub.
Backing NEC head Avi Simhon at a meeting of the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee was Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel, who pledged over the coming months to get the cabinet to decide on a date for the closure of Bazan Group Oil Refineries Ltd.
Bazan — one of whose iconic former cooling towers collapsed earlier this month — occupies 526 acres (2,130 dunams) in Haifa Bay, close to the most heavily populated areas of northern Israel. Its refinery imports crude oil to make a range of refined products for industry, transport and agriculture, 40 percent of which are then exported. Subsidiaries make products ranging from bitumen for road surfaces to waxes, oils, lubricants and polymers.
Faced with significant air pollution and above-average incidences of cancer and respiratory disease, Haifa residents and environmental activists have been campaigning for years to to shut the complex down.
Pollution levels in Haifa have been a frequent subject of dispute.
In June last year, the Environmental Protection Ministry issued a report which said that the number of emissions of volatile organic pollutants, including many carcinogens, had dipped by 56% between 2015 and 2018
The figures — released while Ze’ev Elkin (Likud) was still environment minister — were rejected by local environmental activists, who pointed to what they said was a “questionable analysis of data, a lack of transparency as a policy, and declarations that don’t line up with the review of implementation of the national plan in Haifa,” which was developed and accepted by the Environmental Protection Ministry in 2015.
The accuracy of the ministry’s report was further called into question just two weeks after its release when the State Comptroller issued his own report, charging that Haifa’s air quality had barely changed over the previous four years and that residents of Israel’s third-largest city and the surrounding metropolitan area — about 900,000 people — were being exposed to carcinogenic pollutants just as much as when the national plan was devised.
