The problem
Gaza families pay punishing prices to heat and cook — a gas cylinder costs 64 shekels ($18.47) — while olive presses dump tens of thousands of tonnes of jift each year into sewers and fields, where its polyphenols poison crops and seep into aquifers. Meanwhile nearly 80% of young university graduates cannot find work.
How it works
Civil engineering graduates Tamer Abo Motlaq, Usama Qudaih, and Khaled Abo Motlaq grind fresh olive-mill pomace, treat it to remove the bad smell and cut smoke, compress it through a pellet machine into cylindrical blocks with air gaps, and sun-dry the result. Unable to afford the $11,000 commercial machine, they built their own from scratch in a local workshop for $3,000. The pellets fuel home heating and cooking, and Khan Younis farmers burn them for up to 12 hours of greenhouse and chicken-farm heat.
Pain points
Unaffordable cooking gas, unsustainable logging of scarce trees for firewood, toxic olive waste with nowhere to go, and educated youth with no employers.
Business model
Volume sales of a cheaper fuel: at $0.20/kg — about half the firewood price — a few cents’ worth of jift substitutes for an $18.47 gas cylinder, with factories seeking year-round supply contracts and a portable phone-charging heater on the drawing board.
Challenges
A single self-built machine caps output at 1,000kg an hour against demand that already exceeds supply; pomace arrives seasonally with the harvest; and beyond the $5,000 micro-grant there is no capital cushion for a second machine or a larger workforce.
Funding
- Raised: $5,000 micro-funding plus technical assistance and coaching from the Ma’an Development Center, won through a Danish Church Aid startup contest (Al Jazeera, Dec 2019).
Latest — Dec 2019
In a 17 December 2019 Al Jazeera feature, the founders reported demand outrunning their 1,000kg-an-hour output, factory buyers requesting year-round contracts, and plans to double capacity and staff within a year alongside the portable-heater prototype.