With a background in electrical engineering, petrochemicals and mining, designer and innovator Tony Lopes' has been inspired to find more sustainable ways of using sustainable resources to their maximum capacity, while reducing harmful side-effects on the environment.

His change in thinking also inspired a change in lifestyle, which he encapsulates in Albert Einstein's famous quote: “Put back into the earth at least what you took out of it."

Since then, he has been tinkering with low-technology, sustainable energy sources that he creates himself. He uses these to benefit his family, disadvantaged individuals and communities alike.

Lopes cooks with solar energy or methane gas produced in an assortment of discarded coffee and paint tins; grows his own vegetables; runs his car on old cooking oil; is experimenting with an anaerobic digester; heats water with a solar geyser made from plastic bottles; and recycles just about everything.

Lopes was a speaker at  the TEDxJohannesburg 2013 talk. For more information go to www.lowtech.co.za.