DIY To Power Our Planet: An (Mini) Earth Day Field Guide

Earth Day 2026 isn’t about lofty pledges or abstract policy—it’s about what you can build, hack, repair, and share today. The theme, “Our Power, Our Planet,” shares some key tenets of Maker culture, elevating tools over talk, prototypes over promises, and communities over complacency. Its a distillation and an exhortation to do what we can, work with what we have, be creative and fearless, collaborate globally, and enjoy the ride. NOW. We are all in this together. To help you get aligned with the this year’s Earth day goals. We’ve highlighted projects from our archives and like-minded creators, and thrown in a few extras. Stop waiting and start making.

Clean energy stops being abstract when you generate your own watts. Makers have been turning rooftops, balconies, and backyards into experimental labs for a post-fossil-fuel world. And, with each new leap in technology the returns improve. What’s important here? Big change is incremental and a functional microgrid ecosystem needs innovation, hard work, and a whole lot of collaboration—of technology and humans. Friend of Make: and alt energy innovator and evangelist Saul Griffith provides some of the most cogent and compelling explanations around. You can read his subsequent book, Electrify Everything (which put all these ideas together) or get started with his series of “Fix Our Planet” articles in Make:

Part 1: Electrify Everything! : This article is about envisioning the project to decarbonize America (and the world), and the role of makers in achieving it. It can be done. It is urgent. It is audacious.

Part 2: Decarbonization Begins At Home : “Three things I like to think of as 21st century infrastructure—and if you do just these three, you solve half of your decarbonizing problem in decisions that last for decades. You don’t need to be mired in day-to-day consumer guilt because you’ve invested in long-term solutions to your carbon shadow. Succinctly:

1. Buy, build, or rent electric vehicles to replace your gas guzzlers
2. Install heat pumps for home and water heating, and an induction range
3. Install solar on your roof, or buy community renewables if you can’t.

Part 3: New Power Nation

The cheapest future energy is locally generated electricity—especially rooftop solar—because it avoids transmission costs and scales fast. What can you do?

1. Install or experiment with small-scale solar – LOW TECH SOLAR
2. Advocate for solar on schools, workplaces, and parking lots
3. Use your home, garage, or balcony as a micro power station – check out Make: Vol. 92 (see below) author Daniel Connell’s YouTube channel OpenSourceLowTech

Part 4: Reinventing a Material World

Wrap you head around these small scale projects and really get a feel for the process of decarbonization.

Vape companies get away with putting perfectly good rechargeable lithium batteries in a single-use device. Some brands do include a charging circuit to make use of a larger liquid reservoir. But once the liquid runs out, the device is still intended to be thrown out. Becky Stern shares how you can “harvest” these lithium ion batteries and build a new power storage source. MAKE IT

Repair is both a practical skill and a cultural mindset, rooted in curiosity, frugality, and community collaboration, even as modern products become harder to fix and require advocacy like the right-to-repair movement.One of the clearest takeaways from “Design to Repair” is blunt: many products aren’t hard to fix by accident—they’re designed that way. Repairability lives or dies in early design choices—like whether a device is held together with screws or sealed with glue, or whether a battery can be swapped without specialized tools.

Jude Pullen, the creative technologist in the UK who talks with Dale Dougherty in the article above, took a journey to figure out why so many devices are difficult to repair. It started when the battery in his headphones died or would not take a charge. He’s written a seven part series on Design Spark about what he did and what he learned. And a lot of it has to do with batteries. Moving through the steps with him is both illustrative and inspiring.

Wayne Seltzer, who grew up fixing discarded electronics, turned that skill into a teenage repair business, and later helped found community Fix-It Clinics. Fix-it Clinics and repair Cafes alike show up in communities across the world to share practical skills and build awareness in the fight against obsolescence. READ MORE about Wayne’s journey.

Real-world examples provide a roadmap to get started on your own repair journey—which often starts by choosing a repairable product. It might be less plug-n-play, but its likely to last longer and teach you how it works.

Fairphone, a smartphone built around modular parts you can swap with a screwdriver—battery, camera, even the display. It proves you can have modern performance and repairability, challenging the idea that sleek design requires sealed, disposable hardware. In fact, every repairable object does two things at once: Its not trash and it teaches the next person that taking things apart is still allowed.

Automation can create efficiencies, using power only when necessary and streamlining home power use–especially important when you are generating your own (limited) power. Journalist Samir Makwana makes his own smart home gadgets with ESP2 boards and he gives his why and how straightforwardly:

“Why does a smart plug need a cloud account? Why do they keep sending data to a remote server? And why are the automations limited to their app? Since I began building my own sensors and devices with ESP32, I have stopped asking such questions. All I do is wire the sensors to the ESP32 board and flash a customizable firmware using ESPHome. Then, it integrates with Home Assistant, a smart home platform, keeps my activities on my home network, and gives me access to all the data it generates.”

Maker Chloe Madison, who spoke at Maker Faire Bay Area 2025 and operates VoidBox Industries goes smaller scale, with sustainable and technical vanlife. Their focus is on Off Grid living and home assistant, and there are how-to’s here that can be applied across van, tiny home, or larger scale contexts. Take a trip with Gary Bussy to learn more about DIY tech for your mobile adventure. LEARN MORE.

Sometimes (OK, often) projects are made like Frankenstein, out of the pieces of many different things. Machines contains many interchangeable parts that can be repurposed. Understanding them makes this possible.

Upcycle A 3D Printer: Why Buy New When You Can Make Something or Improve On What You Have

We all like shiny new things, but the churn is real and upgrading an existing device as your skills improve can be expensive. While a new printer may be needed for advances in your builds, that old printer isn’t useless! “Upcycle a 3D Printer” shows how outdated or broken printers don’t have to become e-waste—you can strip them for precision parts like motors, rails, and frames, then rebuild them into entirely new tools such as CNC machines, plotters, or custom fabrication rigs. The core idea is that a 3D printer is really a parts ecosystem, and reusing those components extends their life while saving money and materials. Why do this? Because instead of tossing complex hardware, you turn it into a building block for new builds—cutting waste, learning how machines actually work, and embodying the Maker principle that nothing useful should go to the landfill if it can be remade into something better. Example: CNC Hot Wire Foam Cutter—by attaching the hot wire to a CNC, the cuts become amazingly smooth.

Reducing waste by fixing is one side of the argument, another is simply making less waste or waste that biodegrades quickly is another. Paper straws and corn-based plastic have become ever more common and makers, but makers and material experts alike are excited about fungi’s fast growing adaptability for packaging and other material uses. Biofabrication is growing, literally! READ MORE

Earth Day 2026 isn’t asking for perfection—it’s asking for participation. You don’t need permission to improve the world. You need curiosity, tools, and a willingness to fail forward. So this Earth Day, don’t just celebrate the planet, prototype a better one. Better yet, find (or create) a community and do it together. Sometimes making is just a way of gaining a sense of control in the world, in understanding it better. Some things feel inevitable—and scary—like rising seas. A rising tide may not float all boats (figuratively), but being able to build a boat will certainly improve your chances at staying dry. Both functional and elegant the FOLD-A-BOAT Corplast Kayak designed by Hong Wong and built by Nathaniel Taylor will keep you dry and get you out of the shop and into the wild. BUILD YOUR OWN.

Happy Earth Day! Go make something better and have fun doing it!