Electrolux have finally announced the winner of their 2007 Design Lab, the student competition to design eco-friendly and sustainable household appliances for 2020. This year’s winning design, the ‘e-Wash’ by Levente Szab from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art & Design in Hungary, is an attractive and compact washing machine that uses soap nuts instead of regular detergent. According to Gizmag the e-Wash took inspiration from India and Nepal where people have used the soap nut (sapindus mucorossi) for centuries to clean their clothes, and where a kilogram of soap nuts would last the typical person a year: “I was looking for a substance that could replace the detergent.”
Second place went to the Pebble, a portable solar food cooker by Laura Pandelle from École Boulle. “inspired by the fact that we use very powerful appliances for little uses, particularly in the kitchen,” the Pebble uses spray-on solar cells and induction heating for precise, energy-efficient cooking, combining sustainability with modern nomadic lifestyles.
Third place was awarded to He Cheng Fei from Jiangnan University, China for his Go Fresh fridge, an energy-saving fridge with 12 individual, honeycomb-shaped compartments that are temperature-controlled and automatically close the air inlet when the correct temperature is reached
All the runners up are also worth a look- in particular the very clever Fog Shower that uses a mere 2 litres of water for a 5 minute shower, compared to the 26 litres used by today’s water-saving showerheads in the same time. Check them all out at Electrolux Design Lab
via PSFK
My wife recently purchased a bag of soapnuts to use for cleaning cloth diapers for our baby girl. They worked better than any other laundry detergent she had tried. She was so impressed that she bought them in bulk & opened up an e-store so that she have a home-based business and still raise our daughter. Her site is http://Stores.HotterThanHealth.com Check it out!
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