2) Dr. Dvora Namdar

Palm oil is a non-sustainable product causing massive global deforestation processes and the destruction of wild life natural habitats. One of the main goals of palm oil industry is to replace palm oil with another equivalent substance. Searching ancient texts lead to the discovery of a long lost such substance – date oil. Date oil produced of waste is a new and improved source for oil substance, not yet studied. The research aims to assess date oil potential as a new substance, which will provide a new income to under exploited drylands. We expect date oil production to enable increasing exploitation of date waste(s), to reduce environmental pollution. With that, production of date oil may significantly increase desert cultivation areas, which in turn will enable increasing employment in desert area and the reduction of deforestation of rain forests. For this end we studied the chemical composition of date oil, the effect of age and species on the stability of oil composition, and the question of seasonality on oil structure and content.