6 years ago, Ángel worked in oil extraction. Today he is an expert in clean technologies and renewable energies.
Like many members of our team, Ángel grew up on a farm, in his father’s land in Españita, Tlaxcala. His parents, both COVID-19 survivors, instilled in him from an early age a love for agriculture and ecology. His mother worked as an educator, teaching workshops on herbal medicine, ecology, and backyard agriculture. His father, on the other hand, worked in the production of maguey and pulque, a traditional Mexican fermented drink. Ángel remembers his childhood scraping the maguey plants and transporting the pulque barrels to the train with the help of horses and donkeys. Now times have changed, and the large quantities of pulque that the train transported to Mexico City have decreased considerably: “Now there are a lot of myths around pulque because breweries have displaced its production,” Ángel tells us. His father continues to produce pulque, now in smaller quantities, and complements it with the preparation and sale of rabbit barbecue on maguey leaves.
Ángel studied Industrial Engineering, a career that led him to work on the offshore oil extraction platforms of Campeche. While there, Ángel began to detect the harsh truths of fossil fuels: the spills, the pollution, the unsustainability of an energy source that hides kilometers under the ocean floor. A faithful lover of the environment, Ángel decided to bet for change and started working as a Sistema.bio technician. He is now part of our Research and Development team, and dedicates himself to finding new applications for biogas.
The family’s love for agriculture and the environment led them to work with the Mexican Organic Markets Network, a space that has allowed Ángel to learn about organic agriculture, clean technologies and bio-construction. For the last 6 years, Ángel has dedicated himself to applying everything he’s learned in the construction of his own house: “I have been learning about different clean technologies for many years, but I have never seen them all together. So I wondered how I could combine them in a harmonious way.”
Angel’s house, which could also be called his cleantech lab, has solar panels and a rainwater harvesting system. Beyond that, it has a multi-stage biofilter with which he recycles gray waters from all the sinks, as well as a dry toilet that allows him to efficiently use the water he harvests. More than an avid student, Ángel is an inventor at heart, adapting and modifying everything he learns in creating a completely sustainable home. Now he is working on the perfection of some bike-machines which will eventually allow him to run all the electrical appliances in his house by pedaling.
All these wonderful applications are complemented, of course, with a greenhouse, in which Ángel produces his food. “I want to produce everything that I consume right here, from electricity to water,” he tells us.
Ángel started off in Sistema.bio as a technician, and within a few months he began to propose ideas to improve our systems and their applications. His experience and creativity have been essential for the improvement of our products, and he has participated in important advances such as the creation of our new stove and our water heater. “What I like the most is adapting different technologies to use at home. It gives me great satisfaction to see that clean technology does work and that it truly represents a major change for our users.”
For him, the value of Sistema.bio does not lie solely in our technology, but in our ability to work directly with small farmers. Because it is through them that we manage to have an impact on the environmental awareness of rural communities. There is no better witness of the fact that clean technologies can change the future of agriculture than each and every one of our users.
Ángel’s life and work are a clear example that change depends on us. Each and every one of us has a role to play in the future of the world, and now it is more necessary than ever to modify our practices, to rethink our models of consumption. To ask ourselves if we want to dedicate our lives to the destruction of the Earth, or if we want instead to join forces and take care of it. For Ángel, the difference between these two options lies in clean technologies: “I want people to realize that the use of different clean technologies is the most appropriate way to live, because oil is not forever. I should know, I’ve seen it.”
Text by Elena Coll | Art by Brianda Suárez | Edited by Montserrat Cortez & Xunaxi Cruz
