There was a time in Israel when public service announcements warned the population to save water. Taking shorter showers, planting resilient gardens and many other recommendations were advertised to the Israelis in order to avoid wasting water.
In the dry and hot Middle East, clean water is liquid gold. Israel is depending more and more on seawater and the country already counts five desalination plants, among which the Sorek plant, the largest reverse-osmosis desalination facility in the world.
Back in 2004, the country relied mostly on groundwater and rainwater. Thanks to the desalination method invented by Israeli scientist Alexander Zarchin and introduced for the first time in Eilat in the sixties, Israel does not need to rely on the weather anymore to procure drinking water to the population.
Today, 70% of Israel’s domestic water demand is provided by desalination, a process by which salt and other impurities are removed from seawater to produce potable water. In other terms, the country is producing around 600 million cubic meter of desalinated water to meet its population’s needs.
Israel is a global leader in desalination and is expected to be the first in the world to depend fully on desalination plants by 2022. A sixth plant is to be built not far from the Sorek plant and a seventh around the Northern coast, near Nahariya.
The Jewish state is not only a leader in this field, it’s also sharing its expertise with the rest of the world. Israeli company IDE technology is assisting over 40 countries with desalination technologies.
"We have desalination plants in China, the United States, and Australia, to name a few. We will also desalinate sewage around the world in a high scale as climate change worsens," Jacky Ben Yaish, the Vice President of Israeli water desalination company IDE Technologies said.
Despite its small size, Israel has also contributed to increase the drinkable water supply in China and India, the two most populated countries in the world.
Israel, located in one of the driest areas of the world, has succeeded to provide enough drinking water to its population and is now tackling water scarcity all over the world.