Show notes
Episode Notes Episode summary Andre and Margaret talk about a lot of things. They talk about recycling/reusing/remelting plastics, turning them into fuel, setting up solar power systems, setting up DIY internet, intranets and mesh networks as well as some concepts dealing with solar punk and hydroponics, and of course how most things can be easily analogized to baking a cake. Guest Info Andre can be found at www.anarchosolarpunk.substack.com, or on Twitter @HydroponicTrash or on TikTok @HydroponicTrash. Host Info Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Andre on Solar Power, DIY Internet, Mesh Networks, and Solar Punk Margaret 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host, Margaret killjoy. And I use 'she' and 'they' pronouns. And I am very excited about this week's episode, which I guess I probably say, most weeks. But, I'm excited to be talking to Andre, who is someone I first ran across his work because someone was just I think someone sent it to me or was showing me these, these pictures of someone who had 'hydroponic trash' as the user name, and was talking about making off grid internet through mesh networking. And I was like, "Yeah, this is up my alley," but not my alley that I've actually explored. It's a alley that I'm interested in. So I'm very excited. I think you all will be very excited. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show in the network. 01:45 Jingle Margaret 02:23 Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then maybe kind of a little bit about yourself about the kind of stuff that we're going to be talking about today. Like how you got into it or what you do? Andre 02:34 Yeah, for sure. My name is Andre, my pronouns are he/him. I go by Hydroponic Trash on Twitter and Tik Tok. I focus a lot on upcycling things that people would normally kind of regard as like trash, like recycling plastic containers to make indoor vertical hydroponic gardens. I'm a hacker, a gardener, a woodworker, I kind of tend to do a lot of random shit. So. I also write speculative solar punk fiction on combining technology, both low and high tech, with social change, and balancing that with the ecosystem. With that being said, I've been also kind of focusing in on infrastructure, and how people can build passive and active systems to meet their basic needs like food, water, shelter, communications, electricity. Right now, what that kind of looks like is making off grid intranet networks, off grid solar power, and some other passive projects that kind of deal with DIY off grid stuff. Margaret 03:47 Yeah! You basically just listed all of my interests. This very exciting to me. I'm going to ask at the end of the episode as well, but do you want to say where people can find like, say, for example, your speculative fiction, like, I know that you write about a lot of the stuff that you do, and you also write fiction. Where can people find that? Andre 04:03 Yeah, so mainly, I post my long form stuff on anarchosolarpunk.substack.com. So mainly post my like, long form writing on Substack. But, I post a lot of written form content and other stuff to my Twitter, HydroponicTrash and Tik Tok, I posted videos whenever I can make videos about a whole bunch of various different topics or projects that I'm working on. Margaret 04:29 That's cool. Okay, so I was gonna start with off grid internet. But first, I want to ask you about recycling plastic trash, because I'm really excited about ways to...recycling is like fake, right, these days, you know, like market based recycling? It seems like most, I don't have the numbers in front of me or whatever. But it seems like more and more if you put something in the recycling bin, it just gets thrown in the landfill. And so I'm really excited about ways that people can directly recycle. So, what does that look like that you're recycling plastic trash. Is this like melting it down? Or are you just like repurposing it or what's happening? Andre 05:03 So, at the moment, it's mostly repurposing, but I am going to start doing actual plastic recycling by melting it down and making it into other objects. But um, so right now repurposing plastic, it really started when I, like, just saw how many plastic containers there were just out in the world, I've been picking up trash in like my local park for a little bit. So, while picking up trash, it was like, it makes you really, really aware of the type of pollution that's out there in the world, because you're picking it up out of like waterways and in parks and stuff. So. it got me thinking of like, okay, well, plastic to-go containers, for instance, how do we actually like reuse these types of things. So, what I started doing was taking old Tupperware, that was just kind of sitting in my cabinet, sitting in my kitchen. And I drilled holes for it to put in net cups, which are usually used for hydroponics, and I just started growing plants in it. So trying to find some creative and different ways to not only like reuse plastic in a safe manner, but not only to reuse the plastic, but to find a new use for it. So that way, it didn't just end up going into the landfill. And it was also kind of doing something productive as well. Margaret 06:24 Yeah. Yeah, I, I got really excited when I, I people think people might have already heard me talk about this, but I'm really excited about the idea of basically like, setting up mutual aid recycling in the same way that I think that neighborhoods can compost with each other. Like, some of the infrastructure, it seems like is better put at a neighborhood level, like a small community level than like a, you know, an individual level. But I'm curious when you start repurposing it....Okay, so the things that I've come up with for plastic--I haven't done any of these things.This is all just me falling down rabbit holes on YouTube and stuff.--The main things is people taking certain kinds and making DIY 3D printable plastic. Other ones are like literally just melting it down and putting it into forms and molds. And then the one that I'm like, kind of the most excited about, although it's sort of terrible is that apparently you can make diesel fuel out of plastic DIY? I don't know, like, what do you? What are your aspirations? Or what are you thinking on for your DIY recycling? Andre 07:22 So, all of that pretty much entire, all the stuff that you just said, is pretty much what I want to do. So I'll go into some more repurposing stuff and talking about specifically about additive manufacturing and recycling inputs into stuff. So yeah, like, recycling, plastics is a really big thing. So recycling PLA plastic or recycling...there's a whole bunch of plastics that will melt and be able to remelt that you can make in certain different things. And I think that recycling plastics specifically for 3d printing is going to be kind of like the next frontier of additive manufacturing, because not only are you taking plastics...so say, for instance...it's a full cycle...So, we could be not only cleaning up the environment of plastic waste, but using that plastic and re-melting it down and making it into new objects, when otherwise that plastic would have just been floating in some water in a creek or sitting, you know, not deteriorating in a landfill. Margaret 08:29 Yeah. Andre 08:30 And so from there, it kind of opens up a whole new space of thinking about the things that we use and thinking about manufacturing in general, because we're moving away from mining the earth and using natural resources and exploiting the natural resources to make the inputs for the stuff. And instead, mining the trash and mining the stuff that we've that we've thrown away and regarded as trash and mining that. So, I kind of think of it as like a closed loop, circular ecosystem of removing trash from the environment, repurposing it. And then not only that, kind of changing our social relations when it comes to how we deal with objects, changing our conceptions of things of like disposability, changing our conceptions of how we treat objects, and moving away from disposal into like modularity or repurposing stuff. So yeah, I think it's really interesting to think of it in that way of like, instead of making these new things, taking what we've already polluted the earth with and making things out of that. Margaret 09:45 Yeah, no, this is...I'm just gonna basically over and over be like, "Yeah, this is this is my alley. This is the shit that I love." Yeah, one of the things that I notice is that, you know, from living off--I don't currently live off grid, but I've spent a lot of my time living off grid--is you start noticing every single object that comes into your purview, right? Because 'what are you going to do with it at the end?' becomes this very important thing. If you don't have trash pickup, if you don't have a way to just easily make the thing go away, then you have to be like, "Okay, I'm going to compost this, I'm going to, you know, compost that." I was just thinking of cardboard. And I was like, "Oh, I used to burn all my cardboard, but I'm gonna try and move to composting it," you know. And, you know, just like thinking, "Okay, I'm responsible for all of these objects, I've chosen to caretake." And this isn't me trying to be like, "Oh, recycling is gonna save the world," or whatever, because it's like, but for me, it's more about when we think about when we start thinking of small scale systems, based on all of the things involved, I think that puts us in a better position to imagine better futures. Because we actually have to think to ourselves like, "Well, if I don't want, if I want to use plastic, what the fuck am I going to do with it afterwards?" And I mean, I don't actually particularly, I used to sort of hate plastic. And now I'm kind of like now that I think of mining the trash for plastic. I sort of like it, you know? Andre 11:05 Yeah, I could talk more about turning plastic into fuel. Margaret 11:09 Yeah, please, do I only know the like YouTube level of it. Andre 11:15 Yeah, so another part of that is...okay, so, even if we were to say, for instance, like in the future, get everything that we wanted, have the big 'R' Revolution, you know, have the utopic vision that we have come to fruition, there's still going to be the problem of trash, there's still going to be the problem of yeah, like, what do we do with plastic, even after it's like, use has kind of gone through, and we can't reuse anymore? Like, what do we do with it?Like, another option of that, too, is using the plastic as a fuel source. So you can do stuff like pyrolysis, where basically, you're heating up plastic, condensing that, and basically making it back into a form of burnable fuel. And like, you know, personally, I absolutely hate combustible fuels, obviously, for their, for their, their impact to the environment. But then again, there are a lot of things that are absolutely necessary to run. So say for instance, you know, if we are using renewables only to power things, one issue is, say, for instance, solar, if you don't get a lot of sunlight, you don't get power, pretty much. And you could supplement that with other, you know, renewable energies. But there might be times especially in say, like a natural disaster, when like, you absolutely need power to power like medical equipment to power to power hospitals, or to power equipment that we need up and running. And so that would be a time when, like, using these fuels would really make a lot of sense. On the flip side of that, too, talking about like fuel and stuff like that, there's also making hydrogen fuel using electrolysis. So, using electricity, to basically separate the hydrogen from water, and then using that hydrogen as a fuel. So, that's another, you know, way of approaching it and way of approaching energy, not thinking of extracting it from the earth, but trying to figure out new ways and different ways of finding energy that's really all around us. Margaret 13:34 Yeah, my, my favorite, I looked into it at the last place I lived because was on enough of a hill, I got really into storing electrical power through gravity. You know, like, you could do this thing where I've seen people do it where you like, you set up...okay, you set up a water...a rain barrel at the bottom of your house. And then you also set up a rain barrel at the top of your house. And you use your solar while it's running, instead of to power a lithium battery, which is obviously not a renewable resource, you know, which is the thing that people often forget. Well, I mean, whatever, it's better than some things. But, you know, the battery storage is one of the weakest parts of off-grid power, right? And so you put your rain barrel at the top of your house, and then while there's power, you pump the water up to the roof. And then when there's not power coming through the solar, then the, the rainwater comes back down and it charges...like I mean this charges like a cell phone, this is not a you know, but people are talking about doing it on these industrial scales where you can do it like water towers, you can do it, you know, dammed areas, whatever.. I'm not presenting it as like the perfect solution, but just like interesting to me that there's all of these different ways that we can store power that we don't traditionally think of. I don't know. Andre 14:54 Yeah, exactly. And it's one of those things where like, it isn't necessarily profitable too, to do stuff like that. So it just isn't being done right now. But if we were to look at living in a post capitalist world, obviously, we want to pick solutions and pick things that not only like are detrimental socially, but not detrimental ecologically as well. So like stuff like that is just so perfect in taking the energy that we have just all around us and using it in responsible ways. So yeah, Margaret 15:29 Okay, so this isn't even what we were going to talk about today. I just got really excited about that. The the main thing I wanted to talk to you about today is, is off-grid internet is mesh networking is DIY internet. And I'm wondering if you could explain what that kind of concept is? Andre 15:45 Yeah, for sure. So I'll kind of go into a little bit of background on like, why, or what really got me started in thinking on this train of thought. So like, I live in Texas. And living in Texas has made me very aware of kind of the crumbling infrastructure in this country. Margaret 16:06 Whaaat?! [Sarcastically] Andre 16:07 Yeah, I know, "What?" a private grid run by a corporation that seems to fail, even though there's no regulation, "What?Oh." And a big wake up call was winter storm Yuri, which like completely, absolutely fucked up Texas. It was a week long ice storm with snow. And, it just like completely destroyed the homes of just thousands of people. Thousands of people lost their lives because of the storm. And it ju…
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