LOW-TECH MAGAZINE

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?

The surgeon, a painting by David Teniers, 1670s. 

Vertical Farming Does Not Save Space

If the electricity for a vertical farm is supplied by solar panels, the energy production takes up at least as much space as the vertical farm saves.

How and why I stopped buying new laptops

Being an independent journalist – or an office worker if you wish – I always reasoned that I needed a decent computer and that I need to pay for that quality. Between 2000 and 2017, I consumed three laptops that I bought new and which cost me around 5,000 euros in total – roughly 300 euros per year over the entire period. The average useful life of my three laptops was 5.7 years.

Low-tech Magazine is now written and published on a 2006 ThinkPad X60s.

In 2017, somewhere between getting my office and my website off-the-grid, I decided not to buy any more new laptops. Instead, I switched to a 2006 second-hand machine that I purchased online for 50 euros and which does everything that I want and need. Including a new battery and a simple hardware upgrade, I invested less than 150 euros.

If my 2006 laptop lasts as long as my other machines – if it runs for another 1.7 years – it will have cost me only 26 euros per year. That’s more than 10 times less than the cost of my previous laptops. In this article, I explain my motivation for not buying any more new laptops, and how you could do the same.

How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

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.

Thermoelectric Stoves: Ditch the Solar Panels?

Wood stoves can provide a household with thermal energy for cooking and for space and water heating. Wood stoves equipped with thermoelectric generators also produce electricity, which can be more sustainable, more reliable and less costly than power from solar panels.

Fruit Trenches: Cultivating Subtropical Plants in Freezing Temperatures

Citrus fruits (oranges, lemons, mandarins, tangerines, grapefruits, limes, pomeloes) are the highest-value fruit crop in terms of international trade. Citrus plants are not frost-hardy and can only be grown in tropical and subtropical climates – unless they are cultivated in fossil fuel heated glasshouses. 

However, during the first half of the twentieth century, citrus fruits came to be grown a good distance from the (sub)tropical regions they usually thrive in. The Russians managed to grow citrus outdoors, where temperatures drop as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius, and without the use of glass or fossil fuels.

By 1950, the Soviet Union boasted 30,000 hectares of citrus plantations, producing 200,000 tonnes of fruits per year.