Battery used Battery charging

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

This is a solar-powered website, which means it sometimes goes offline
Theme

Waste and Recycling

Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?

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.

How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel?

George Cove, a forgotten solar power pioneer, may have built a highly efficient photovoltaic panel 40 years before Bell Labs engineers invented silicon cells. If proven to work, his design could lead to less complex and more sustainable solar panels.

Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities

In the mid 20th century, whole cities’ sewage systems safely and successfully used fish to treat and purify their water. Waste-fed fish ponds are a low-tech, cheap, and sustainable alternative to deal with our own shit – and to obtain high protein food in the process.

How Sustainable is High-tech Health Care?

Can we make modern health care carbon-neutral and maintain the levels of care, pain relief, and longevity that we have come to take for granted?

How and Why I Stopped Buying New Laptops

As a freelance journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I have always believed that I should regularly buy a new laptop. But older machines offer more quality for much less money.

How to Make Wind Power Sustainable Again

If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.

Reinventing the Small Wind Turbine

A wooden rotor and tower greatly increase the net energy output over the lifetime of a small wind turbine.

How Circular is the Circular Economy?

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.

The Messy World of Fermentation

When modernity meets its end-point and creates a world where everything is sterile, controlled, and known, there will be little space for fermentation.

Vietnam's Low-tech Food System Takes Advantage of Decay

Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like

Pigeon Towers: A Low-tech Alternative to Synthetic Fertilizers

Pigeon towers helped Persian farmers cultivate all kinds of crops on previously arid, thin-soil land.

The Art of Producing Sustainable Consumer Goods: Basketry

Virtually all human cultures have made baskets, and have apparently done so since we co-existed with ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats.