High-tech housing: Green Israeli startups breaking the mold
At first glance, the product developed by Israeli startup Solight looks like a spacecraft, or a capsule for launching astronauts into space in a science fiction movie. In fact, it’s a device that uses one of Earth’s most abundant energy sources: sunlight. The company, founded in 2012, developed a system that collects natural light and channels it into a building’s interior – and in doing so, reduces electricity consumption and improves the health of the people inside.
“When we started on our way 11 years ago, we thought mostly about saving energy,” says Ofer Becker, Solight’s chief technology officer and co-founder, along with his brother Dror. “In most workplaces and homes, they turn on the artificial lights during the day too, so we planned to develop better tools to take advantage of the sunlight and reduce electricity consumption. After spending a few years developing this technology and achieving good results, we started considering the health aspect of natural light. It looked too good to be true: Beyond its critical effect on our sleep and wake cycles, research conducted in the United States and the European Union found that students’ performance improved when natural light was introduced into classrooms. It helps Alzheimer’s patients, increases work productivity and is linked to bone building for adults.”
Solight’s system features a unit for gathering natural light, which is placed on the roof of the building or near a southern-facing wall. The light moves from the unit through pipes that resemble air conditioning ducts, and reaches areas inside the building that lack natural light, like the basement. As opposed to regular windows or a window on the roof, the system doesn’t allow heat enter the building, and also doesn’t let through damaging ultra-violet light, so those working inside don’t have to use sunscreen.
Solight’s product is not just good for our health – there are also environmental benefits: “Due to the fact you that you need less electricity to illuminate the building and cool it, the amount of carbon dioxide it emits drops by 30 percent to 35 percent,” says Becker. At the moment, the company operates only in Israel, and markets its products to educational institutions, hotels, office buildings and private homes. “It’s easy to put the system into new houses, but we’re trying very hard to adapt existing homes. Most of the housing market is existing homes, so this is the real challenge,” he adds.
Becker says that even if “green construction” still hasn’t taken off in Israel, he sees a change for the better. “A few years ago, people looked at us strangely. Now the benefits of natural light are better known. The topic may still be in its infancy in Israel compared to the awareness in Europe, but we still see enormous development. Over the past few weeks, people who are looking for the technology have approached us, and we believe it will develop the more people understand the importance of energy efficient construction.”
Taking the initial risk
“Not all contractors are the same,” says Ronit Eshel, the director of business strategy and advanced manufacturing at the Israel Innovation Authority in the Economy and Industry Ministry. “Today, there are more and more contractors who are interested in green construction technologies, because they understand it has economic value. The real estate company YH Dimri [Construction and Development], for example, bought the company Isramarin a few months ago, which focuses on modular construction, and we hope it will trickle down to smaller contractors. They don’t want to be the first to try it, but it’s easier after someone else takes the initial risk.”
For three years, the Israel Innovation Authority has been issuing calls for proposals for construction companies to join one of two program tracks: Mofet, which is intended to advance research and development in industrial firms; and a pilot program for technology companies with new products to conduct a trial at a construction site. “So far, we have supported about 20 companies, most of which have some environmental focus. It’s not the central goal, but one of them; but when you talk about industrialized construction, the environment benefits,” she says.
Architect Noam Austerlitz, the owner of Austerlitz Architecture and Sustainable Innovative Design, an initiative for promoting innovation in construction, praises the work of the Innovation Authority and CONTech, a government initiative to promote advanced construction and property technology – but also recognizes a problem with their methods: There is a gap between the technological model and the economic model. While the technology is progressing swiftly, the economic model is still stuck in the previous century.
“Many of the green technologies are too expensive for the developers,” says Austerlitz. “From my experience, it’s worth it for the developer to invest in these technologies only when they’re not selling the property, and mostly if they bear the ongoing operating costs for energy and maintenance. In the rest of the cases, when the developers are building to sell, or the operating costs fall on others, the simple financial logic for the developer says to invest the minimum that meets the standards and the law. It would take a financial model where the developer profits from the reduced expenses over time, or when the regulations, the customers or future renters demand high quality, green and economical construction, for the developer to consider investing in it. Even then just barely – because most [developers] have no idea how to calculate the cost-benefit tradeoff over time,” says Austerlitz.
Another problem with the model is the responsibility placed on the architect or engineer, Austerlitz adds. “Let’s assume that as an architect, I want to use a method that reduces the weight of the building. Who stands behind it and guarantees that in case there’s a problem, it won’t be my responsibility? If the government would give backing to anyone incorporating green technology into construction, more architects, engineers and developers would take it upon themselves.”
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Hundreds of startups and industrial firms in Israel are developing technologies for the construction industry, and many of them put an emphasis on environmental technologies. They don’t do so just for ideological reasons: Given that the global construction industry is responsible for 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, many countries have changed their regulatory requirements in recent years to require those working in the industry – from architects to contractors and everyone in between – to take steps throughout the entire chain of production, from the factory to the construction site, and throughout the entire lifetime of the building. This has opened up an important market for entrepreneurs who are capable of developing technologies that reduce the industry’s carbon footprint. Here are a few of them.
ECOncrete: Green marine construction
In the case of the startup ECOncrete, regulations for marine construction is what opened the door for it to do business around the world. ECOncrete was founded by marine biologists Dr. Ido Sella and Dr. Shimrit Perkol-Finkel (who was killed in a road accident in March 2021). The company has developed a special concrete to be used for marine construction.
Standard concrete disrupts the chemical balance of the marine environment, creates a hostile environment for bivalve mollusks and corals that grow in the small fissures in the seabed, and encourages the growth of invasive species. In comparison, ECOncrete’s unique concrete helps the indigenous species to flourish around it – while these species reinforce the concrete at the same time. The company sells a powder that is added to the cement, various materials to be sprayed into molds before the concrete is poured, and molds – or parts of molds – for the concrete.
“The harmful effect of concrete on the ecosystem is clear to anyone involved in marine research,” says Sella. “Seventy percent of the infrastructure in bodies of water around the world is made out of concrete, and with global warming, which has led to increasingly intense storms and a rise in sea levels, they are being built higher and stronger. This means a lot more concrete in the sea. In the United States, Europe and Australia there are regulations mandating environmental compensation: In New York, for example, for every acre [4 dunams] of sea that is turned into a breakwater, pier or port, the developer must pay $1.5 million for the damage caused. Currently eight breakwaters are under construction at the end of Staten Island, and our technology constitutes 20 percent of it. Because of this, the environmental compensation the state would have had to pay dropped from $18 million to just $4 million, because it invested in more ecological construction.
“Another example is the entrance channel to the port of San Diego: The port wasn’t able to receive environmental permits because all the construction damaged the marine environment. Our concrete enabled them not to hurt the native species, and even increased the diversity of species,” Sella says.
Even though the company’s RD center is located in Israel, ECOncrete does not sell its technology in Israel – because the environmental legislation here is light years away from legislation elsewhere around the world. “Israel is moving backward and isn’t closing the gap,” says Sella. “Countries that started addressing the issue much later than us are passing us by. There are good intentions here, the Environmental Protection Ministry has excellent people, but it doesn’t have enough power. Environmental issues are pushed down to the bottom of the agenda, and it’s absurd, because Israel is so dependent on the sea, for drinking water and for energy, and the thinking is narrow and short term, while this ministry’s goals are for the long term.”
Criaterra Earth Technologies: Ecological wall tiles
Adital Ela, the founder and CEO of Criaterra, was born into the construction industry: She comes from a Jerusalem family of contractors, and says she spent her childhood at construction sites. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in industrial design from the Holon Institute of Technology, she began her career in product design – but the deeper she went into the field, the more she realized that she was looking for a way to integrate innovation into the conservative world she grew up in.
“A third of the waste humanity creates comes from the construction sector, and a lot of this comes from materials being burned,” says Ela. “My goal was to prove it’s possible to manufacture circular products without burning” – products that use less raw materials and can be repurposed at the end of their lifespan, with little to no waste – “that work effectively in the industry, compete with equivalent products and have a low carbon and energy footprint.”
After doing a master’s degree in sustainable design at the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Ela put together a team of engineers and designers who tried to create raw materials that would meet these requirements – without knowing what the final product would be.
“The principle that motivated our work is circularity, which is not a concept currently embraced by modern construction,” says Ela. “Nowadays you build a building and when it reaches the end of its life span, you demolish it and bury the remains. In the future of construction, you see the building as a bank of materials: From the time when you plan it, you think how everything that enters it will become a component of the next building. We were a small company and decided to start with a simple product, tiles, because they don’t require very complicated regulation, and are used in such a way that the architects – the innovators – set the tone,” she says.
The result: tiles made out of a mix of insoluble minerals, including blends of stone, sand and clay powders along with plant fibers, which are then coated with a mix of plant-based oils and resins. Up to 70 percent of the mixture can come from recycled sources. The tiles are not fired, but are pressed and dried at low heat, so they are totally biodegradable at the end of their use.
Criaterra’s factory is located in Holon, and thanks to a 2.2 million euro ($2.4 million) grant from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, Criaterra is about to build an industrial production line in Portugal. The tiles are installed in offices, malls and private homes – for now, mostly in Israel. The company is working hard on developing a cinder block designed for industrial construction, to be used to build the outer structure of green buildings. It will provide a high level of thermal insulation and will enable builders to save on the many layers of insulation and finishing that are used today. It will save hours of work for construction workers – as well as tons of unnecessary materials.
“In the beginning, we were very alone in the campaign, but things have changed,” says Ela. “In the last three years, quite a number of technologies focused on green production are rethinking the burning of materials in the construction process, and investment funds and construction companies are interested. The change came because of the pressure on companies to reduce their carbon footprint, and the increase in natural gas prices was also very significant in recent months. The green standard introduced in Israel a few years ago is forgiving when it comes to requirements, to an almost worrying extent, but very slowly they are tightening the belt. Regulation is now focused on incentives and less on compulsion. From there to leading the conservative members of this group to move forward – there is still a long way to go,” she adds.
Skycon: A smart shell for buildings
Developing green construction technologies isn’t just for young startups anymore. One of the older industrial firms doing this is Skycon, which is part of the Aluminum Construction Group. Skycon, which specializes in planning, production and installation of building shells and facades, is riding a global architectural trend – buildings in complex geometric configurations. The more complex the form of the building, the more complex the facade is when it comes to engineering.
“For years a building’s shell was an unintelligent system of a transparent element connected to a frame, which separates between the external and internal environment,” says Tal Rabinovitch, Skycon’s director of development. The more construction methods have developed, the more the shell has become technologically advanced, he says, with the capacity to adapt to geometrically complex construction and energy needs.
Skycon’s shell consists of an outer and inner layer of glass. Energy is trapped between the layers, preventing it from entering the building and providing insulation – and thus greatly reducing the carbon footprint. The shell features a special shading system that adapts to the angle of the sun’s rays to allow just enough heat to enter the building. Skycon’s system makes use of the energy trapped in the middle layer through photovoltaic cells and harnesses the heat for the building’s needs.
Skycon also wants to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions created during the manufacturing process. They have moved from on-site construction to pre-fabrication, and a significant portion of the aluminum for the shell now comes from scrap.
The company is now developing, in cooperation with the Israel Innovation Authority, an even more sophisticated shell made out of compound materials that can be used in more complex geometric figures and reduce the amount of heat entering the building. This system would meet the demands of towers, and would also insulate the building’s interior better than aluminum, glass or concrete.
CONTech: Support for startups
One of the Israeli bodies that supports construction startups, including those that put an emphasis on environmental development, is CONTech, which was founded six years ago as a joint initiative of the Israel Builders Association, the Economy and Industry Ministry and the Construction and Housing Ministry. CONTech runs an incubator program for startups whose technology addresses various stages of the building’s lifecycle, from planning to project management. The incubator’s first five rounds supported 27 companies that together raised about $100 million; its sixth round will open soon.
“The construction industry’s biggest problem is productivity,” says the CEO of CONTech, Zachi Flatto. “While in other industries it’s rising, in construction, it’s falling. The reason is simple: These are complicated projects, and the manpower stays the same. The average age of a construction worker in the world is 49, and people don’t want to work in the field anymore. So the trend is to bring in as much automation and robotics as possible to make the construction easier, and in general to turn a construction site into a factory. Instead of reinventing the wheel with every construction project, we want to turn it into an assembly line: to manufacture as many things as possible at a factory and then install them at the site.”
But technology is not enough: Because the construction industry is conservative and fixed in its ways, it’s hard to bring in new methods. “How do you educate those in the field? That’s the million dollar question,” says Flatto. “You need to find organizations that are willing to lead the market, people who believe in the goal. If developers and contractors understand that the technology benefits them – thanks to increased efficiency, increasing productivity, meeting standards – they will adopt it. We also work in developing methods for implementation. The Defense Ministry, for example, is the largest consumer of [construction] work in Israel, with a range of projects, and we work with the [ministry’s] engineering and construction branch to help them choose technologies and guide them in implementing them.”
Promoting green technologies is an even more difficult mission, but Flatto thinks the change is essential because of regulatory progress. “The situation here is very clear: The regulation will become very strict, and anyone who doesn’t understand that today will understand it tomorrow. There will be no choice but to adopt the green technologies, because the developer and the contractor will have to calculate the carbon emissions for every project, and given how they work today – they won’t meet the standards. It will no longer be a matter of goodwill or a belief in the sustainable values. Anyone who doesn’t understand this is hiding their head in the sand.”