Chief Scientist and Founder, HomeBiogas
The Business of Peace through Green Energy: The HomeBiogas Story
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Stern Center, Great Room, 7 p.m.
Teller will discuss how he is using his company, HomeBiogas, as a mechanism for peace building, sustainable development, women’s empowerment, and improvement of the quality of health and life for citizens of developing countries.
Yair Teller is chief scientist and co-founder of the HomeBiogas Company based in Netanya, Israel. HomeBiogas produces a household renewable energy appliance that recycles kitchen waste into cooking gas and organic fertilizer. Profits from sales to suburban customers and a successful crowd-funding campaign are used to support donation of HomeBiogas units to economically disadvantaged Bedouin, Palestinian, and Ugandan families for alleviation of poverty. The work of HomeBiogas has been recognized by the UN and the Peres Center for Peace.
This event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and Student Senate, and co-sponsored by the departments of Judaic studies, Middle East studies and earth sciences, the Center for Sustainable Education, the Treehouse, J Street U, and the Geology Club.
Biography (provided by the speaker)
Yair Teller is a visionary and entrepreneur committed to the cause of sustainability, and driven to empower underserved communities throughout the world. He is an internationally recognized authority on domestic biogas systems, and frequently lectures at institutions throughout the world. Teller has led forefront research developing integrative systems of waste management, anaerobic digestion, and algae production at Ben Gurion University. Teller discovered domestic biogas in India, and went on to conduct field projects constructing systems in Mexico, Kenya, the Palestinian Territories, and Israel.
In 2010, Yair Teller, together with Oshik Efrati and Erez Lanzer, founded HomeBiogas, and began developing the most advanced and affordable small-scale biogas systems.
Currently, Yair is the chief scientist for HomeBiogas and directs international peace-building projects with the EU, USAID, Peres Center for Peace, and Arava Institute for environmental studies. In November 2015, the company launched an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign that reached 200% of its goal over two months, and sold systems to over twenty countries. Yair’s leadership has pushed the company to dream big; the HomeBiogas vision is to make advanced biogas technology mainstream and accessible to families throughout the world.
Video of the Lecture