The Annual Junior Water Prize competition (SIWI, or WaterTank) is held in Stockholm, Sweden. During the competition, youth from all over the world compete by presenting their breakthrough research projects on the field of water. The main goal of this competition is to establish the next generation of professionals in the water industry, and encourage today’s youth to think about and cope with global challenges pertaining to a lack of water security, from a myriad of perspectives.

In 2020, representatives from the State of Israel advanced to the final round of the international SIWI competition, and was ranked among the top 10 countries in the world, thanks to a project presented by Nadav Algerbali, a student of the Ner Tamid Bnei Akiva Yeshiva High School in Hashmoniam. An Alpha Program student at the Hebrew University for Youth, Nadav presented his project on “The effectiveness of the use of minerals’ substitution responses when removing pollutants from groundwater.” The project was formulated under the advisement of Mr. Yoni Israeli, in the laboratory of Professor Simon Emmanuel, on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s campus.

In his research, Nadav examined the potential of growing algae near sea fish, and he created an integrated interface model that creates animal and plant-based proteins, using negligible amounts of sweet water resources. The study found that the Elba algae could be used as a biological filter, thereby reducing the negative environmental effects of fish cages from the shore by assimilating surplus nutritional materials and nitrogen compounds that are secreted from fish species. Growing algae and fish in integrated systems can reduce cattle, poultry, and land-based vegetable farming, which, in turn, can significantly decrease the use of sweet waters and enable hundreds of trillions of liters of water to be saved each year.

For more information about the competition, click here.