Thanks to the efforts of the Tidhar-Harel real estate partnership, 60 acres of the Acre Bay land will be receiving a much needed cleanup with plans of rehabilitating the area and reversing the environmental damage that occurred in the several decades of site’s industrial use. The project will include construction of several water and soil treatment facilities and is expected to take years to complete. After that, the land is planned to get converted for residential use with the beach area reopening to the public.
Ever since Electrochemical Industries, a company that produced chlorine and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), spent over 20 years dumping their toxic waste into the nearby sea, the soil and groundwater of Acre Bay have been contaminated. Recent testing discovered that the highest level of contamination was coming from the groundwater directly under where their main factory was situated. The mercury levels there were so high that the environmental and public health officials discouraged fishermen from fishing in the area since many of the edible fish species contained mercury levels that exceeded safe consumption guidelines.
Electrochemical Industries was founded in 1956, and though they did eventually correct their practices and filter the wastewater, the damage had already been done. In fact, according to a 2001 survey conducted by Barcelona Convention’s Action Plan for the Mediterranean, the location was one of Israel’s seven most contaminated hot spots.
After the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection approved the soil and groundwater rehabilitation plan for the Acre Bay site in May 2022, one of the environmental groups commissioned to work on the site’s decontamination reached out to Ohio Lumex to purchase the RA-915M mercury vapor analyzer with the PYRO-915 attachment. They have since been successfully using the system to analyze mercury levels in air and sediments around the Acre Bay.
Ohio Lumex is excited to be a part of this remediation project. We look forward to receiving further updates about how it progresses.
Resources: “Environment Ministry greenlights pollution rehab project at Acre Bay site”, The Times of Israel
