The Demand for My Services is Growing

I'm fully booked and new clients are begging me to accept their cases. An area I was involved from the beginning is starting to develope and become a serious market for my consulting services.

Tnuva, Israel largest dairy company, was fined 15 million shekel (about 4 million dollars). The reason, sending "polluted" wastewaters to be discharged to the sea. The charge is ridiculous and may seem bizarre to an observer in another country, yet 4 million dollars are real money.

Ten years ago it was legislated that nothing can be discharged into the sea without a permit. Seaside municipalities soon erected wastewater treatment plants and discharged only treated liquids. Municipal employees and ministry of environment employees are twin creatures, so they seldom attack each other. With hated private companies the attitude is different: "They should reduce their exaggerated profits and pay for using public space" (Free quote from the current minister of environment).

The first legislated area was "Timlachot" that is waters with a salt content 200 mg more than tap water. Tap water in Israel has about 300 to 600 mg salt content so we are talking about wastewaters with 800 mg NaCl content. It is absolutely forbidden to discharge those waters into rivers or lakes because of the fear that they may salinize groundwater. It is also forbidden to discharge them into sea, except with a permit. The idea is that this saltwater will pollute the seawater, which has about 35,000 mg salt content.

In my humble opinion, 800 mg water will DILUTE 35,000 mg seawater, not salinize it. They may have noticed that so the legislation was expanded to regulate additional parameters such as metals (seawater is even more rich in metal ions than in salt), BOD, COD, pH, odors and colors. All discharge was to be done only through two controlled sea outfalls - one in Tel Aviv and the other one in Haifa. The owners of the outfalls soon started collecting monopoly rents. They have a nice business model.

Now, Tnuva the hated dairy for-profit monopoly, sent its waters to be discharged into the sea and in some cases it was slightly acidic or milky/turbulent. The Ministry sent them letters, demanded explanations, requested to be submitted a technical plan to remedy the situation (the kind of things I do for a living), and demanded reports and so on. According to the lawyers (working on the bsais of percentage of the fines collected), Tnuva failed to submit those papers and continued conveying its waters to the outfall operator and paying the fees. But did not explain a thing. Now they will have to pay 4 million dollars and the minister is making political capital on its back, painting them as an environmental criminal greedy fascist monopoly and himself the defender of the public.

I can well imagine what happened. Tnuva is a large company and enjoys hundreds of regulators sucking its blood and living off it. Tnuva people felt they were complying with a stupid law at a large cost to themselves. They did not consider that the letters sent by the Ministry asking for information (they receive hundreds per month) had any importance. Probably they were standard letters signed with an (+) by a secretary. They let time pass without answering, hoping that the regulators will forget, be transferred or new things will come up. That is what many companies do.

But last summer Tnuva was the object of public protests and demonstrations, specifically for the price of its cottage cheese, which some ignorant journalist discovered was higher in Israel than Europe. (Europe subsidizes its dairy sector, but that is irrelevant). Tnuva became the symbol embodying the capitalist monopolist greedy corporation, and the perfect victim for a populist politician. Not answering those letters is costing Tnuva now 4 million dollars.

I always beg my clients to send me any regulatory letter of phone calls they receive, to answer and to keep entertained the bureaucrats. That works.

I learned that technique from my friend .. former chief of Shafdan Wastewater Treatment Plant. The plant is dumping untreated human sludge into the sea, against all the legislation and regulations. It was sued dozens of times in the last twenty years. They always answer politely and submit plans and designs and investment processes they are advancing. Myself participated in many meeting to decide which is the best technique to process, digest, pelletize, recycle, compostize, etc. the sludge. We had very important, very interesting debates. Foreign experts were called in and delivered magnificent powerpoint lectures. I spent days writing down protocols. Twenty years have passed and Shafdan is still dumping untreated sewage in the Mediterranean. It has yet to complete the design and then, surely, it will start arranging the financing and proceed to build the facility.

That is the difference between Shafdan (a publicly owned non-profit corporation, paying fantastic salaries to its managers) and Tnuva (a greedy capitalist oligopoly): The bureaucrats of Shafdan know how to deal with fellow bureaucrats. As a former bureaucrat myself, I also know how to deflect stupid regulations, but I dont know how to make (real) money from it.