In a tiny apartment in the Spanish coastal town of El Masnou, just outside of Barcelona, Kris de Decker runs a website completely powered by a small solar panel crammed into the corner of his balcony. With its light blue background and low-res imagery, the site for Low-Tech Magazine is intentionally retro—a callback to blogs and self-hosted sites from the mid-to-late 1990s. Each web page uses only .77 megabytes of data, making it more than 50 percent leaner than the average web page. It is also static, meaning it lives entirely on its locally hosted solar-powered server and as a result is only generated once, requiring less computing power than a dynamic site that generates anew for each visitor. Low-Tech has no ads and doesn’t use cookies. Even if the site were not powered by solar energy, these choices would make it that rare thing: an environmentally friendly web page.

According to a tool developed by the web design firm Wholegrain Digital, Low-Tech’s carbon footprint, i.e., the amount of electricity required to run it, is around 0.24 grams of carbon per page view. This article on The New Republic’s website uses around 2.6g of carbon, more than 10 times as much. Every website on the internet requires energy—and in a global economic system that’s mostly reliant on fossil fuel, that means more pollution. Even the most basic internet activities incur eye-popping costs: Streaming one hour of Netflix a week requires more electricity, annually, than the yearly output of two new refrigerators.

The articles on Low-Tech, mostly written by de Decker, are focused on novel solutions to our energy and tech predicament. In one piece, he explains how to get your apartment off the grid; in another, he advocates for an internet speed limit to reduce the energy costs of rapid data usage. From design to content, Low-Tech is a thought experiment about a possible DIY future for the web. It’s an internet that is locally governed, slower, and sustainable.

There are some downsides to the solar-powered site—a cloudy day in Barcelona might force Low-Tech to go off-line. And since Google search prioritizes faster and more reliable websites, sites like Low-Tech might always be relegated to the margins of the mainstream web. But de Decker suggests we will all have to make sacrifices and adjustments if we want a web that is ecologically viable, rather than the one we know today: owned and operated by massive telecom companies, reliant on the dirty power of cloud computing, and geared toward profit.

“One of the reasons why the energy use of the internet keeps increasing is that we are always online, and from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to sleep, we’re connected,” de Decker says. “We thought it was important to question always being online. Do we really need to be connected every minute of the day?”