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