Did you know you can make a solar refrigerator, or a super efficient LED light fixture from an old cell phone charger? It’s even easy and we’ll show you how.

We, The Appropriate Technology Collaborative, have designed several new sustainable technologies and we want to give our designs away. Our technologies: A solar refrigerator, a manual treadle pump, a solar lighting system and a recycled cellphone LED light.

With the Green Effect / Sun Chips / National Geographic money we will hold a minimum of 4 workshops per year for two years showing these technologies, distributing do-it-yourself drawings and making a professionally produced instructional video that will be available through YouTube and other websites so that more people can make these technologies themselves.

Our solar refrigerator has no moving parts, it doesn’t use electricity, you just put it in the sun and it chills down to near freezing. Our cell phone charger light uses recycled parts and is super efficient. Besides being strikingly cool it will saves energy and the planet. Our treadle pump is for farming and gardening off the grid. Our solar LED lighting system is ideal for backup power. It can power two lights, a small radio and charge a cell phone.

Southeast Michigan is economically depressed. People need these inexpensive energy saving technologies. We can reduce demand on the power grid, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and empower people to take charge of their carbon footprints.

These are all proven technologies.
We’ve made them.
You can too.