We cannot lower carbon emissions if we keep producing steel with fossil fuels.
Consumer societies produce enough plastic waste to power at least 10% of motorized road traffic. Dutch designer Gijs Schalkx grabbed the opportunity and now drives his car on the waste he collects.
Cycling is the most sustainable form of transportation, but the bicycle is becoming increasingly damaging to the environment. The energy and material used for its production go up while its life expectancy decreases.
While manufacturing modern firearms and bullets depends on a global supply chain and fossil fuels, bows and arrows can be made anywhere out of anything, using only human power and simple hand tools.
Around the 17th century, the Dutch started reinforcing their dykes and harbours with sturdy mats the size of football pitches – hand-woven from thousands of twigs grown on nearby coppice plantations. These “fascine mattresses” were weighted with rocks and sunk into canals, estuaries, and rivers.
From the Neolithic to the beginning of the twentieth century, coppiced woodlands, pollarded trees, and hedgerows provided people with a sustainable supply of energy, materials, and food.
If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.
A wooden rotor and tower greatly increase the net energy output over the lifetime of a small wind turbine.
As long as we keep accumulating raw materials, the closing of the material life cycle remains an illusion, even for materials that are, in principle, recyclable.
Lime burning is a now-forgotten industry that sustained many agrarian communities before energy became cheap.
Modern thermal underclothing offers the possibility to turn the thermostat much lower without sacrificing comfort or sex appeal.
Depending on the size of the kiln, it took between one and six weeks for the fire to complete a full circle.