S1E49 - Andre on Solar Power, DIY Internet, Mesh Networks, and Solar Punk

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 ...