Comment by nine_k

What I liked about their approach is that they picked things that would otherwise be considered trash (clay and dead tree branches from under their feet) and used them in a creative and productive way.

This of course is not scalable. But hacker technology, in its original definition, is not about scalability, but about creative use of existing things.

At scale, solar electricity of course would work better, and likely standard PCB processes would even have a smaller environmental impact. But it's not the point.