From ‘deprinting’ paper to DIY treescopes, Israeli tech draws crowds at COP29
Israeli pavilion at UN climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, features 20 climate tech innovations over two weeks. We put the spotlight on six especially noteworthy endeavors
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
BAKU, Azerbaijan — From a revolutionary reusable paper with removable ink to a counterintuitive method for turning textile waste into plastic products, Israeli technology attracted significant interest at the United Nations climate conference, COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, through Friday.
This is the third year that Israel has had a pavilion at a COP conference. The goal is to advance regional and international partnerships through dozens of events and exposure to the country’s climate tech.
This year, the Israel Export Institute chose 20 companies out of 80 applicants to join the Israel delegation, with 10 appearing each week.
By the end of COP’s first week, Sabine Segal, the institute’s Deputy Director General for International Business Affairs, told The Times of Israel that the conference had been “amazing” for the Israeli companies.
“We’ve had great exposure, and the companies are constantly meeting with representatives of other governments and private businesses.” She added, “There’s great respect for Israel’s abilities and for the solutions we are presenting.”
Despite some early difficulties organizing partnerships with other countries for events and a fear that the Israeli pavilion could be boycotted because of its ongoing wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, visitors ranged from politicians and diplomats to UK farmers interested in making money from dried peatlands visiting Israeli startup Terrra. Others included a group of women from Zambia’s Development Agency seeking agricultural tech to help with drought and Ghanaian representatives who took part in a pavilion event on government-to-government engagement.
While this reporter saw no Arab delegates at Israel’s pavilion that were identifiable by their dress, contacts with Arab nations are reportedly ongoing but largely below the radar until the war ends.
One exception was on Friday, when Gary Soleiman, a climate specialist in the Innovation Diplomacy team of the Israeli NGO Start-up Nation Central, participated in a panel with a Moroccan delegate and bank and investor representatives organized by Azerbaijan’s new Innovation and Digital Development Agency. The agency is already working on cyber security with Israel’s Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, located in the northern city of Haifa — and made clear that financial and other incentives would be available to climate tech companies who could benefit the Central Asian state.
“Since October 7 [when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 mainly civilians, and abducting over 250 to the Gaza Strip], most of our innovation diplomacy with the Middle East and North Africa has been conducted below the radar, but it hasn’t stopped,” Soleiman told The Times of Israel.
“Even with all the sensitivities, we still see tech sector activity with partners in Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain,” he said.
On scaling up cooperation, Soleiman said, “The business opportunities are still out there, even if some people say visible activity will have to wait until after the war.”
The following highlights a few of the 20 companies at the Israeli pavilion.
Reep: the potential to save billions of trees
Among the companies exhibiting during the first week of COP was Reep, which has developed the world’s first technology, using lasers, to remove ink from white printing paper so the paper (and some of the ink pigments) can be reused, currently up to 10 times.
Reep’s tech has the potential to save billions of trees and enable them to continue absorbing global warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (which they do during photosynthesis).
The company is nearing commercialization and planning to partner with global printing corporations to offer a subscription service that includes supplying reprintable paper, which has a special coating to ensure it can be easily reused, as well as “deprinting” machines and software that monitors, verifies and reports on the climate benefits.
Serial climate tech entrepreneur Barak Yekutiely, who co-founded the company with his wife Margalit, who has held senior positions in global printing concerns, said Reep cuts corporate emissions and costs.
It is currently developing AI technology to facilitate fast, internationally-recognized notarization of digital copies of physical documents due to undergo “deprinting.” This will negate the need for physical archives, enabling the paper to be immediately reused.
Pointing out that 40 percent of global tree harvesting is used for paper production, Yekutiely said circular printing would massively reduce the energy, water, chemicals, and carbon emissions involved in the lengthy process of cutting trees, transporting logs, pulping, paper production, shredding and recycling for each page printed.
Recycling paper doesn’t provide solutions to tree felling or to waste, he said. Printing paper used once could only be recycled into lower-quality tissue or packing paper. It eventually ended up in a landfill, generating methane, a powerful global warming gas. He said it was important to understand that a forest cut down for wood could not be easily replaced. “It takes decades, at least, to grow trees that can absorb meaningful amounts of carbon dioxide,” he said.
At COP29, several Israeli ministries expressed interest in piloting Reep’s technology.
Momentick: identifies sources of leaks to within 3m.
Another blue and white company, Momentick, created two and a half years ago, uses satellite and AI to monitor methane leaks from gas and oil upstream (at the wells) and midstream (through the pipes).
Business Development Director Tamir Kessel told The Times of Israel that the company, which uses software only, takes data from multiple satellites and applies algorithms that can identify the exact source of a leak to within three meters.
“Combining general purpose satellites with AI to get the accuracy of the location and the amount of emissions is unique to us,” Kessel said. During COP29, Momentick announced a partnership with one of the largest Japanese firms that insures Japanese oil and gas companies. Kessel spoke about business development for climate tech companies at the Kazakhstan pavilion.
NGV: waste into aviation fuel
The vice president of one of India’s biggest municipal waste management companies could be seen conversing with NGV, whose CTO, Emeritus Prof. Mordechai Herskowitz of Ben Gurion University in southern Israel, has developed catalysts and processes to convert different kinds of waste into aviation fuel and other products.
CEO and co-founder Arie Sussely said the company, founded in July 2023, sought strategic partnerships with gas, waste management, and aerospace industries.
EU regulations starting in January will require that jet fuel includes at least 2% “sustainable aviation fuel,” a percentage that will rise each year, reaching 70% by 2050.
“We estimate that our SAF will be 20% cheaper than our competitors,” Sussely said. He later told The Times of Israel that NGV was discussing several collaboration offers.
Treetoscope: DIY data on irrigation
Treetoscope, created in 2021, has meanwhile developed a “super simple and affordable DIY device” that a farmer can plug into the bark of a tree for data on irrigation. Dotan Eshet, CEO and co-founder, explained that while 70% of the world’s freshwater was used for irrigation, less than 2% of farmers used precision irrigation tools.
“A 2% saving on irrigation would equal the entire water consumption of the US,” he said. Most current solutions showed ECG-type graphs that were too challenging for most farmers. Treetoscope used satellite imaging and other off-the-shelf data, machine learning, and AI to measure how much water was provided, consumed, and needed. It freed the farmer from water calculations, simply determining how long to leave the the taps open.
Adding that Treetoscope was collaborating with well-established concerns such as the Israeli drip irrigation company Netafim, Eshet revealed excellent sales in Turkey since the start of the war with Hamas and Hezbollah, despite Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s cutting ties with Israel.
Anina: reusing ‘ugly’ produce
Anina exhibited an innovative way to reduce food waste, which is to buy produce from farmers that supermarkets don’t want and would otherwise go to landfills.
Esti Brantz and Meidan Levy, who met while studying industrial design at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, turn otherwise healthy vegetables into dry, lightweight, nutritious, ready-to-cook meal capsules prepared just by adding water.
Textre: bridging two industries with the same problem
It was her father’s textile plant that gave Lee Cohen the idea of making new products from textile waste for the plastics industry. The latter totaled nearly 100 million tons globally per year, most of it nylon and polyester (derivatives of the oil industry), Cohen said.
“After 10 years of attempts, the clothing industry still only recycles 1% of textiles into new clothes, and perhaps a bit more into cloths and dolls,” Cohen explained. “There’s no scaleable solution for waste textiles today. In the plastics industry, recycled materials make up a little less than 10%. We are bridging two industries that have the same problem.”
Textre breaks textile waste into hard pellets, which can be upcycled into new, recyclable plastic products, such as clothes hangars and plastic parts for the motor industry.
“The textile industry is the second most polluting in the world,” said co-founder Ariel Yedvab. “We’re replacing virgin polymer produced from the oil industry. Yedvab added that textiles were the source of most microplastics, tiny bits of plastic waste that enter the sea, and the bodies of living creatures, including humans.
Textre hopes to capitalize on new EU regulations that will ban the export of textile waste beyond EU borders unless recycling is the proven aim.
