A Shoe in the Door of the High Tech Electronics Business

Today I visited an electronics factory in a new industrial park, a big electronics corporation quoted on the Nasdaq. The problems I will be treating are unrelated to their core business: They leased a part of the building to a restaurant which has attracted municipal attention because its FOG interceptor (which hs been covered over) and for having appropriated public space (they built a covered gallery on the walkway). The company also built illegally a "ship deck" on the top of the nearby telephone company´s building, and a "chiller" (some kind of modern cold water refrigation system) on the roof of the building, a wood and iron gallery in the big storeroom, all without municipal permit and avoiding paying the arnona, the municipal tax.

I visited their clean room, the manufacturing halls and the management area. Basically, reminds one of a sewing sweat shop in Manhattan in the fifties, long tables of fat and ugly Portorrican ladies assembling cables and small plastic objects with machines. In fact, my impression of the hi-tech factory is rather strange, of a low tech sweatshop. The people I met and showed me around are very ordinary Middle Eastern working class guys. They are ignorant and liars as expectable.

But this is not the hi tech industry I anticipated. Reality is less glamorous than imagined.

How Dirty is a Sorbette Ice Cream Factory's Wastewater?

That is the weighty question I am pondering today. The owner of an ice cream factory asked me if I can do a Nispach Sanitary - a sanitary attachment for his request of municipal permit and for the Ministry of Health's Approved Food Producer licence. He said that the engineer working on that did nothing for weeks and now he needed it urgently. 500 dollars brutto less 50% income tax and 17% social security tax. It is not much money but I get free icecream. How could I say no?

First things first, so I have to report that the coconut sorbette is very good. Further reports are acoming.

The swarthy owner of the business brought me to his new factory, that will produce non dairy low calory fruit sorbette ice cream. He has no water bills and since the factory is not working, he has no idea of the quantity or the quality of the wastewater. He built a 2 cu m FOG interceptor and now I have to justify scientifically that it is appropriate for the factory. The Middle Eastern ice cream man is emphatic in saying that in fact, ice cream produces no wastewater at all, and if some miligrams escape his rigorous hygienic standards, it has no fat nor organic materials. In fact, there is no need for an interceptor, he did it because he is so fanatical about the environment.

I never met an obvious liar so sincere.

(Correction: Forgot we are in the Middle East, the man is only following local modes of expression).

Now, what is the grease concentration of the sorbette icecream factory's wastewater?

Or, what would be a reasonable number?

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Post Scriptum: This morning I submitted the plan and it was approved on the spot. I told the municipal inspector that any number would be guesswork, so he should grant a year long licence and demand real measurements after a year. For a change, the bureaucrat was resaonable (*) and agreed. The Client was not in the factory when I came to ask for money. He will send a cheque.

(*) He is an old friend of mine.

Urban Goat Farm and Cheese Factory - If only possible

For more than a year, I am working on this project and it seems that it will never end.

Here is the story: Shelly is the daughter of a rich Iraki contractor living in a moshav south of Tel Aviv. Originally, the moshav was an agricultural settlement, but it has become an upper class residential suburb of Tel Aviv, attracting people who prefers living in a cottage with ample spaces of green grass around. Shelly is an intense, skinny girl, a lawyer by education who hates her profession and collegues, and has the dream of living and working in a green, pastoral, natural environment such as a goat farm.

Her implied business plan (not that she has one) is excellent in my opinion, since natural or environmental goat milk is a fantastic product in great demand, and the supply is very limited. Goat milk has magical properties in Middle Eastern folklore, cures all kinds of conditions, I even read about a special goat of a Beduin whose milk was specially effective and people took numbers to milk her. Home-made natural no-additives goat cheese can be sold at the farm at very high profit. Shelly is a decided skinny lady and has a loving and hard-working husband who will do everything to make her dream goat farm true.

Shelly bought 50 - 60 goats and learned how to feed and milk them. She was in business! The goats are marvelous, beautiful, very friendly animals, unafraid of people and children. They are extremely curious and come close to you and tactfully inquire who are you, and if you are not watching them, they will eat off your shirt, hand bag, camera, shoes, jeans with your leather wallet including your plastic credit card.

You would think that goat farming in an agricultural settlement would cause no regulatory difficulties, but then, dear reader, you have never met an Israeli bureaucrat. The architect contracted by Shelly to handle the milk parlour design and its approval by local authorities, gave up after a few months and brought Shuky nto the project. Shuky, the evasive environmental expert, evaporated at the first scent of difficulties.

As soon I accepted the project, the friendly goats got stolen by beduins. Shelly built a closed circuit TV alarm system and bought nasty looking dogs and bought another batch of goats. I designed the goat shed and the milking parlor, with its water and wastewater system, it was approved by the local and national authorities and the husband built it. Each goat produced about 2 - 3 liter milk a day, and Tnuva - the giant milk cooperative - agreed to buy all the available natural goat milk at a very attractive price.

As originally dreamed, they wanted to complement the farm with a cheese making room and a small garden shop to sell their products under their own name to the end customer. In the meanwhile, Shelly's father compleated the new large cottage on the other end of the farm, and after moving in, their small cottage was to be transformed into the cheese and yogourt making kitchen and refrigerated maturation room. One of the rooms was to have a window for selling their specialty cheese, freshly baked bread and red wine to the customers sitting in the garden. A pastoral vision indeed.

One thing is to have goats and another one is to produce cheese. The Ministry of Agriculture rather likes the idea that small farmers go into this cottage industry, but the Ministry of Health passionately hates the whole concept. They will never allow food to be manufactured and sold in a natural, primitive and possibly unhigienic setting. They like large, shining rustless steel equipped mechanized industries, that submit technical information and data that can be turned into impressive annual reports. They are against small cottage food industry - in their universe, food is a hazardous product and potential poison, that people consumes and feel unwell, causing untold troubles to the Health Services. Food poisoning rumors appear frequently in the media, and the journalists drag them unlucky bureaucrats in front of TV cameras posing aggressive, inculpating questions why they allowed this dirty, rats-and-bacteria-ridden eating outlet to operate at all. Is it fair that poor unfirm bureaucrat ladies should be dragged into undignified public scandals because the skinny Shelly papa-girl and her dream toy goats?

So the design for the cheese making place was rejected. In fact, it was rejected without any formal examination. At an interview, they demanded total separation between the cheese making area and all the other areas. There had to be a separate area for the workers (what workers?) to change into work uniforms and for taking baths before entering cheese areas. The public had to had access to special sanitary facilities in a different building - not in the cheese making building. And the yoghourt! My parents used to make yoghourt putting a glass of milk near the window, with some old yoghourt remains, and the next morning we had fresh yoghurt. If the Ministry of Health knew about these dangerous, forbidden activities, we could have been demanded!

Anyway, I designed a fully equipped yoghourt making hall and cheese factory. Of course, the building will have to be triple of the existing one, and the investment in machinery and working tables and refrigerators and so on is very large. We have submitted it to the Ministry of Health. If it is approved, Shelly will have a problem because her pastoral home-plus-farm has to become a middle-sized agro-industrial enterprise, with laboratory and so on, far from the green dream place she wanted to build for her and her planned children. She never intended to be a goat-cheese industrialist, but that is what she has to be to sell goat milk or yoghourt or cheese in Israel. And there is a serious possibility that my design will not be approved, because the higiene standards of the food product are not guaranteed enough.

At this point, February 21th., 2006 Shelly knows that there is a problem with her dream, but she is not aware yet of what expects her as an Israeli natural animal food producer. Of course, I got no money for my efforts, since I have yet to produce the permit.

A naive tourist in Israel may ask: Jaim, you are exaggerating. I have toured the country and there are black-veiled beduin women sitting on the road side selling goat yoghurt with pita bread baked on the taboon on an open fire. Unwashed dogs and children were playing around, sharing pita and cheese sandwiches. People stop and eat - and I saw no permits hanged on the unexistent premises's walls.

I will not answer that question now. Just now, I am sad and cannot think of an objective, suitable answer. Let these things hang here unanswered. See you in the next adventure.

Rainfall recycling for Vered´s house

Vered is planning to build a nice 250 sq m house near Ramle, Israel. The area has no central drainage system so I designed a surface runoff infiltration chamber in the topographically lowest corner of the 500 sq m plot.

The house roof has a complete rainfall collecting system, and a central collector conducing to a recycling structure. Typical maximal rainfall (mm rainfall/sq m/hour) and the absorption capacity of the permeable soil layer (sand) were calculated and and then the required contact surface. In the end, the design is a 3.5 m deep manhole made from prefabricated cement rings, with filtration openings to allow infiltration. The manhole is full of gravel and has a 0.60 m diam. cover.

Question: Should the design include an aireation opening?

I got paid in good money!

Some six months ago I designed a wastewater treatment system for a sugarless soya cookies factory in Emek Hefer industrial zone. I was unavailable for a time after, because travelled to Ecuador and later we interned my Mother in the hospital for her second lower back operation. The factory also faced apparently some delays in the approval process (I didn´t ask why). I sent my bill and called every 2 - 3 weeks.

At last the owner said your cheque is in the mail and actually, IT WAS! My 50% tax rate was duely paid to the Timayon, the Ancient Greek word adopted in Hebrew to mean the taxman, or monies that could be used profitably but were lost senselessly.

The soya cookies have no sugar nor carbs, and are said to be extreemely healthy. They are dry and have a woody texture, and taste, well, like soya beans. They are in great demand in Israel and it is also exported.

Israel´s New Boom Sector - Money Management

I have been spending more time in thinking about how to make money on Tel Aviv stock exchange than doing the backbreaking work of designing wastewater systems on Autocad, so I got some investment ideas. Some of them, like the R.F.K. Technologies situation, are being proved successful; others, like Machteshim Agan, less so. All in all, the last two weeks have benn disastrous, but the reason is that I overstayed my Machteshim and Israel Chemicals investments and they went bad. I did better in my new small cap, illiquid stocks, an area that analysts never cover, chock-full of unexploited opportunities.

I think Israel's next boom sector will be in the financial sector. We Jews have been always in the money management area and are very good at it. Wall Street is full of Jews, most Stock Exchanges have been founded by Jews or Jews had been among the founders, such as in Amsterdam and London. It is a traditional area of Jewish excellence and prominence.

Israelis can be found in most big funds and international banks, but there are no Israeli players in the global arena. Israeli banks always offered excellent service to foreign Jews, but that is all. I think local money management organizations, like Solomon and Markstone, are bounded to expand internationally and succeed. Israel will be like Switzerland, only much better and dinamic.

My immediate goal is to learn how to make money of our native money-making ability.

Wastewater Treatment for the Lemonade Factory

A natural lemonade factory needs a licence from the Ministry of Public Health and the Municipality. Currently, it is emitting untreated wastewater. The owner is a young and clever Sepharadi Jew who employs a couple of very blond and fat Russian workers. He invited me to visit the plant. I am always hungry for new problems, so do that for no money. They all seem so earnest, dedicated and hard working. The place seems well organized and clean. I always fall in love with a neat, efficient, purposeful organization.

At this point, no one really knows what the problem may be. The wastewater must be acidic (pH 2 or 3) and it may be corroding the asbest-cement pipeline, requiring pH correction before the municipal connection. It may also carry high BOD content, requiring filtration of lemon pulp and settling. The place has a 420 lt FOG interceptor, which may be good for nothing. The cover has been asphalted over, therefore it has never been opened nor cleaned. I asked the owner to clean it and make it accessible. A flocculant may be added to favour the formation of flocs and improve settling properties.

This is a factory operating with a very acidic organic raw material. Everything is made of nirosta, a non rusting steel. The air is acrid, acidic, horrible. It seemed to have no unhealthy effect on the Russians.

Suggestions, welcome.

The Ruin of the Bnei Brak Jewelry Electroplating Shop (cont.)

Your friendly Israeli environmental regulators succeeded at last to ruin and destroy the Bnei Brak Jewelry Electroplating Shop I was advising, a fairly large export industry, based on Russian and Georgian immigrant's investment and employing at its peak some 30 workers.

The firm had just received a very aggressive letter from the National Ministry of Environment informing that they have analysed the pretreatment plan submitted during the Manager's interrogation at the Green Police's facilities, and they demand a long list of laboratory analysis and mass balances (in addition to all the eventual demands of the local environmental authorities, that are paralelly studying the same plan).

Last week, just to show they did not forget him, the manager received a surprise visit of representatives of the local/regional environmental authorities. The national and the local levels operate totally independently and their activities are unco-ordinated and competitive and overlapping with each other, always accusing the rival agency of being too soft on presumed infractors). Our beloved "pakidim" (functionaires) are direct descendants of the Turkish Empire "effendis" who would never lower themselves to talk to natives, and if forced by circumstances, the tone, invariably, would be that of an upright and outraged teacher of morality talking to an incorregible child molester. Our gnomic manager was so shocked that he decided to close the sale of most of the machinery and equipment, and dispatched for incineration all remaining raw materials to the National Repository of Hazardous Materials at Ramat Hovav in the Negev.

The result for me is that my work, a complete and detailed plan to transform the electroplating plant into a zero-emission system, with 100% water recycling, is no more relevant. I shall never see a penny for my hard work.

The manager asked me to come to his now-empty factory to write a very strong answer to the Enviromental Authorities, accusing them of having wrecked his business as well as the livelihoods of many Israelis. (In addition, I could wax lyrically on their shattering the Consultant's hopes of getting paid).

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Reflections on a failure:

(1) I accepted the job after another consultant abandoned it in the middle, probably because he felt it was a lost cause. On my defense, I knew about the fact that other(s) have worked on the project only after I was fully immersed in it.

(2) I accepted to work as a subcontractor of Shuky, not with the principal. Shuky had one or two heart attacks in the middle and disappeared after pocketing the first installment.

(3) I badly underestimated the amount of work and potential complications of the project.

(4) I did not care to sign a contract. I know that in the world of jewelry, a handshake is more enforceable than a contract in Israel, but probably a signed document may have helped me to receive some money.

(5) I never insisted on the full disclosure of information. I never saw records (of water use, for example). That reduced my credibility in front of the regulators.

(6) I did not use my network of experienced collegues. The solution to the treatment problem started to emerge only after my meeting with the (secret) chemist of the factory. (He is secret because officially he is forbidden to work - he works in another firm or collects insurance for a work accident, I am not sure).

Conclusion: Be extemely wary to be associated with a "sick" project.

... and this is not the end.

Water supply in moshav Ginaton

This morning I went to moshav Ginnaton where a resident wants to build a 150 sq m structure and needs to install a fire hydrant. The system features was measured and the results were:

Static pressure: 7 bar Flow: 0 cu.m./h
Dynamic pressure: 1.8 bar Flow: 58 cu m /h

There is not enough water for a hydrant. I investigated how can this be. Results:

- The 3" inflow pipe was reduced to 2" for home supply
- The buster pump was inactivated - it was early in the morning and the system was calibrated for domiciliary supply.

The resident will have to pay a second measurement (700 shekel = 150 $ to the Israeli Standards Institute).