At age 15, my brother, Wade Ortel, bought a rusty 1973 Volkswagen Bug, a purchase that marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey. His dream? To build an electric car, all on his own, using salvaged laptop batteries. Two years and countless hours of work later, the “e-Bug” is a reality. In front of our family’s home on Block Island, Rhode Island, sits a little blue Bug with an extension cord running from its gas cap to an outlet in the kitchen. It is likely the world’s first home-brew electric car powered entirely by repurposed laptop batteries. On a tiny island 13 miles off the coast of mainland Rhode Island, one remarkable kid has quietly led the way in developing environmentally sound transportation using materials that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill.

Hopping into the e-Bug presents a curious two-way time warp. On one hand, you are catapulted into the past in the small, narrow car, with its lone side mirror, manual windows and lack of heat and airbags. On the other hand, the car is clearly a futuristic vehicle. A digital gauge mounted on the dashboard displays the voltage of the battery pack and how much current is being drawn from it in real time; behind the front seats rests the handmade battery pack, comprised of 18 smaller packs of lithium ion cells. These cells were painstakingly extracted from dead laptop batteries and hand-soldered into place in a configuration my brother designed himself. For safety purposes, Wade soldered a fuse to each of the 1,530 cells individually. If one cell shorts, its fuse melts and it is removed from the circuit, leaving the rest of the battery pack unaffected and preventing an explosion.