On October 10th I have launched IRMI – The Israeli Raw Materials Innovation Forum for the Construction and Infrastructure Industries. I believe in making Israel an innovation leader in raw materials for the building and infrastructure sector. The challenge is to join forces in this journey and to jumpstart together cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary innovation processes, which would also attract investors from Israel and abroad.
Why did I choose to establish IRMI?
My grandfather, RIP, who was a metal turner and owned a factory in Tel Aviv that manufactured machinery for the Ministry of Defense and for carpentry workshop across the country. As a little girl, I very much enjoyed watching the machines, sketches, and plans, and to study the need to reinvent whatever it was that the clients were asking for. In time, my father also learned the profession and was a hired manager of a tin can production line. So I am, in fact, the third generation to have grown up among traditional and renewing industries. This might be where my love for management, design, planning, material, waste, and challenges stems from.
What do you think about circular raw materials for the construction industry? This kind of thinking necessitates the understanding of the origin of the material, its disintegration and reconstruction with other materials. Recurring experiments and trials ARE the way toward the development of inventions and innovations, followed by testing the use of the new product, its resilience and implementation in the reality of design/planning/engineering, and then its disintegration… and repeatedly so. These are processes that are currently already taking place in companies, being researched and documented in many stages around the world. Unfortunately, as is the case in many issues in the sphere of sustainability, so it happens in this case as well, that Israel is somewhat lagging behind; and if we are to justify the StartUp Nation's reputation of innovation, we must hurry up and catch up. Fortunately, It is doable and within reach.
Should we bother to invest in the innovation of raw materials for the construction industry? The contemporary development and growth of smart cities pose many challenges and opportunities in the area of building materials. A study of the Global Construction Materials Market 2017-2021, published by TechNavio in 2017, reports a global annual growth of 7% in adopting innovative construction material technologies. In order for Israel to adopt new and/or renewed materials, many partnerships need to be created. And that, dear readers, is not an easy challenge in a traditional industry such as ours.
In Israel, the importance of the issue emanates from two motivations:
- We pay for the building materials used to build and renovate our homes, and we should understand where these materials come from (some are imported and others domestic) and why their costs are so high.
- The need for an available and relevant platform in Israel, for us and for future generations, that assembles and presents the different aspects of the knowledge and data in one place. These include studies; publications of international conferences; information concerning regulation, legislation, and specifications of raw materials for the construction and infrastructure sector; history, design, and identity of materials; implications of the shortage of natural raw materials in Israel; recruitment of funding sources and mapping out relevant venture capital funds and investors.
Musings from the Sandbox | Misc. and Links
Something borrowed | This post was inspired by My grandfather, RIP, Abraham Plesser.
Hand in hand | IRMI host a session together with Yorai Gabriel about accelerating Construction Tech through Circular Economy mindset in DIF- The Disruptive Innovation Festival 2018. Watch via this link.
Tender, Tender, Tender | Call for proposals no. 32/18 for the establishment and operation of a center for resource efficiency (and an information meeting to be held on Monday, December 17, 2018, in Jerusalem) – details and registration via this link (Hebrew).
Something new | Join us for IRMI's 10th newsletter due to be published this December (In Hebrew)
Registration via this link.
Welcome!
I am pleased to welcome you to my RecycleCity blog, its name incorporates the words: Recycle; from which also emanates the circularity of Cycle; and naturally City. I invite you to read my posts, in which I express my love of the materials that the Israeli city is being constructed with; and discuss urbanism, reuse, recycling, and circularity. My blog posts will observe, contact and document raw material relevant for urban construction. I will share lectures, tours, research and publications from Israel and from around the world that will shed a light toward the understanding of raw materials for the future development of buildings and infrastructure in Israel.
