This Eco-Libre 2024 Annual Report will discuss the state of the Eco-Libre project at the end of 2024 and the progress we made throughout the year 2024.

What is Eco-Libre?
Eco-Libre is a volunteer-run project that designs libre technology for sustainable communities.
Eco-Libre’s mission is to research, develop, document, teach, build, and distribute open-source technology that sustainably enfranchises communities’ human rights.
– Eco-Libre’s mission statement
We aim to provide clear documentation to build low-cost machines, tools, and infrastructure for people all over the world who wish to live in sustainable communities with others.
Executive Summary
- Continuing search for land in Ecuador
- Prototype Progress of Life-Line
- Design changes to Launch-Nest and Treasure-Tower

Michael Altfield registered the domain-name eco-libre.org in June 2023, shortly after arriving to Ecuador.
In 2023, Eco-Libre created four projects (licensed CC BY-SA) which address some of the essential requirements for a new community’s basic human needs: clean water, shelter, electricity, and ecological processing of waste. By releasing these designs under a libre license, it allows for other communities to build their own infrastructure with minimal effort, and it encourages collaboration on standardized design concepts.
As Eco-Libre’s projects mature, we will build experimental prototypes in our own community. To that end, Michael is currently traveling around Ecuador by bicycle in-search of land to found Eco-Libre’s first physical site.
In 2024, Michael explored many regions of Ecuador by bicycle, visiting several sustainable communities along the way.
- Michael’s route exploring Ecuador by bicycle in 2024
- Cycling the Ecuadorian Coast
The priority focus for Michael in 2025 is to buy land where Eco-Libre can physically iterate on projects.
Unfortunately, Jack stopped contributing to Eco-Libre in 2024. Eco-Libre only has 1 active member. If you’d like to help, please contact us about volunteering.
Projects
Eco-Libre was founded in 2023. In the last two years, we’ve begun work on four libre hardware projects. All of them are currently in the early research stages.
Land Search
Our main focus in 2024 and 2025 is to find land.
After completing a cursory circuit-by-bicycle around Ecuador, we have decided to look more closely in the area East of Quito, in the high-altitude Amazon.
In the end of 2024, we explored several areas touching Antisana National Park.
In 2025, we’ll be looking more closely at land in the Cayambe-Coco National Park.
Eco-Libre Launch-Nest
The Eco-Libre Launch-Nest was our first project. The concept is to build a small-footprint, high-occupancy structure for sustainable living of 30-people.

The rooftop has sufficient space for 72 solar panels (2 meter x 1 meter) and 3 parabolic solar concentrators (16 square meter).
The structure is six-stories above-ground, which is the recommended maximum height of a confined masonry structure in an earthquake zone. It also has a basement.
The building is designed with external, enclosed, firewalled staircases on either end. These are symmetrical and designed such that the building design can be rotated around a center courtyard to have four Eco-Libre Launch-Nest structures that share the same stairwells.
Last year we’ve made some important changes to the design:
- We shrunk the structure from 6-stories to 5-stories, and
- We eliminated the 2-story workshop
The original height of 6-stories was selected as the max height recommended for a confined masonry structure built without special engineering.
On further review, while some countries permit 6-storey confined masonry structures, we found that building codes in Colombia, Mexico, and the EU all limit the structure to a max of 5-stories. As the intention of Eco-Libre is to publish standardized designs for reproducibility in the whole world, we decided to to reduce the height of the Launch-Nest such that it would be useful to a wider audience.
Also, it’s very important that our structures can be built simply — without requiring specialists. The garage door opening in the workshop on the second floor left too many unknowns for structural stability, and would likely increase the cost of the structure unnecessarily. So we removed it. The workshop will need to be a separate structure.

Last year we devised an urban plan to get a rough idea of the space required for distribution of Launch-Nests in a community as it scales-up.
This Urban Plan was designed in inkscape at a scale of 1:10000. Every cm represents 100m. The source urban plan .svg can be found in the Launch-Nest’s repo.
Obviously this doesn’t take into account natural geography, such as slope and rivers, which will heavily dictate placement of facilities — but it does provide a rough “minimum space required” for an “ideal” plot.
One of the reasons we’re opting for tall, densely-placed structures is to minimize the number of trees that need to be cut. This Urban Plan gives us an understanding of the ratio of permaculture zones:
- Zones 0 and 1, where there is near-zero vegetation (black),
- Zone 2 for the areas within 30 meters of a structure, which can only have short trees
- Zone 3 for a clearcut area that serves as a fire break
- Zone 4 for areas where we can plant large trees
- Zone 5 for areas where we leave the wilderness untouched
The Urban Plan consists of four “human” zones arranged on four corners of a square — each has four launch nests. In-between each of these zones is a Treasure-Tower (safely located 60 meters from the Launch-Nest zone). The thin black lines between each “zone 1” square is a pedestrian-only road. Bicycles must take the road in the center.
If each launch nest has a maximum capacity for 30 people, then this urban design has a capacity for 480 people. It has a minimum/ideal footprint of about 12 hectares, but real-life conditions (leaving easements for buffer zones of rivers, etc) may require 20-30 hectares. And, of course, this system can be extrapolated in any direction.
Eco-Libre Life-Line
The Eco-Libre Life-Line project is a series of components making up an infrastructure to deliver a clean water pipeline to a community. This includes:

- Collection of raw surface water (eg from a stream)
- Removal of large organic debris & sediments
- Removal of small particles
- Removal of harmful bacteria & parasites
- Clean water storage
In 2024, Eco-Libre started to work on a prototype of the Life-Line project with the Fruit Haven community in Ecuador. In November 2024, Fruit Haven converted one of their water intake dams (which would frequently clog due to its design) into a weir to channel turbulent water down onto an intake grate, following the Eco-Libre design.

Special thanks to Boris Plotkin and the FH1 community, who built the prototype weir shown above.
Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth
How do you sustainably begin to build a community on land without electricity and without any structures?
The Eco-Libre Genesis-Booth is a simple storage shed with >1 kW of PV solar panels on the roof. This is the first structure to be built when jumpstarting a new off-grid community. It provides the power, storage, and outdoor workshop space needed to build-out the community.

In 2023, we made a simple footprint for the Genesis-Booth in CAD that’s 4 meters x 2 meters — just large enough to fit 4 solar panels (2 meters x 1 meter each). Further work is needed in CAD, but this year we also delved into making a framework for our documentation.
We made no changes to the Genesis-Booth in 2024.
The highest priority for the Genesis-Booth is to finish this documentation as a template for other projects. Ideally this should be designed in such a way that information about Eco-Libre in general is seamlessly added to all project’s documentations in a reusable way.
Eco-LIbre Treasure Tower
The Eco-Libre Treasure-Tower project is a 8 meter x 8 meter structure for storing and processing a community’s waste, most importantly their food & fecal compost.

This structure is 5-stories high and barrier-free, with a wrap-around ramp. All but the top-floor have three doors:
- Access door for maintenance
- Deposit Closet
- Deposit Closet
Each deposit closet contains facilities for the collection of human urine and feces and is slightly staggered in elevation so the user’s deposits fall by gravity into their designated collection areas for processing.
Separately from compost, this structure also serves as a storage area for recyclable waste materials, such as metal.
This year we made several important changes:
- The footprint of the structure was increased from 7 meters x 6 meters to 8 meters x 8 meters
- The height of the structure was decreased from 6-stories to 5-stories
- The lowest story was partially placed 1.1 meters below ground
- Wrap-around ramps are much wider
It’s important to us that this structure is barrier-free (eg for accessibility to wheelchair users). While this structure was designed from the start to have wrap-around ramps, only last year did we research best-practices for bathroom layouts. The gold-standard appears to be changing places, which are typically 4 x 3 meters. We wanted to place one CP WC at ground-level, which meant we needed to move “ground floor” slightly below ground level.
For redundancy, we placed a second CP WC at near-ground-level, easily reachable on the face of the structure by going down a ramp. This provides a second accessible WC if the first is occupied.
To make space for these large CP WCs, we increased the footprint of the whole structure to 8 x 8 meters. This allows space for a 2 x 2 meter air well (and potential elevator shaft) in the center of the structure, for easily transporting barrels of compost from below the deposit closets into storage for aging (1-2 years). By rotating one of the CPs, we can actually fit three toilets on the front-face of the structure: two CPs and one small, inaccessible deposit closet.
We also learned that our previous design’s wraparound ramp had a slope of 0.114, which fell short of the US ADA’s recommended slope of 1/12 = 0.08334. With the additional length of the external walls, our wraparound ramp slope is now 2.4/29 = 0.08275. And the slope to the second CP WC is even more accessible, at 1/20 = 0.05 — which is the recommended slope for self-assisted wheelchair users in the EU.
In the absence of an (optional) elevator, many heavy pallets full of compost will need to be (infrequently) shifted from below the deposit closets, into storage for composting, and out of storage after composting. This shouldn’t require any heavy lifting. We can build some sort of ~1-meter tall container ontop of a pallet and use a standard hydraulic pallet truck to move the containers. After investigating the turning radius of standard EU (1.2m x 0.8m) pallet trucks, we increased the width of the wraparound ramps to be two meters wide. Additionally, the landing area outside the maintenance doors has been increased to 3.5 x 4.5 meters — to accommodate the turning radius of a pallet truck turning either direction when exiting those doors.
By removing the deposit closets on the 4th and 5th floors (to provide additional storage space), rough calculations suggest this structure would have space for storing 108 pallets, each with a capacity for roughly 0.7 cubic meters of compost. That gives us 5 inaccessible deposit closets plus 2 CP WCs. Assuming we let each pallet compost for 2 years, that should suffice for 30 people, with 30 people filling on-average one pallet per week.
Currently precision of the structure’s dimensions are limited by unknowns of the CEB walls and floor slab thicknesses. We may, for example, need to increase the footprint of the structure an additional 200-800 mm (or more), depending on the actual wall thickness — if we want to keep the minimum wall-to-wall space of the CP WCs to the recommended 4 x 3 meters.
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