Mention refrigerators to a room of environmentalists…and you’ll notice a sudden chill in the air.
That’s hardly surprising. Once a luxurious marvel, the fridge has become an essential, invisible part of our modern lives. There’s one in over 99.5% of all American homes. It may have revolutionized food storage, but at a lamentable cost to the environment (most notoriously via CFCs released by crumbling fridge insulation)…and to our electricity bills. Before those fine folk at Energy Star rolled their sleeves up, fridges were the most power-hungry appliances in the home.
So, dear fridge. We have many questions. (Such as “where did that ‘d’ come from?”). But uppermost on our lips is: do we really need you?
Ottowan Rachel Muston decided there was really only one way to find out (as Stephen Kurutz reports for the New York Times) – and she didn’t quite manage a fridgeless existence. Perhaps we merely need alternatives to the white monster in the corner of the room, and thankfully, designers are well ahead of us. Taken the winner of design boom’s recent Green Life competition, the Thermodynamic Cooler by Rochus Jacob. It works in a similar way to Mohammad Bah Abba‘s award-winning design, using the cooling properties of evaporating water to drag heat away from the centre of the pot. Simple, beautiful, effective – and unpowered.
Or instead of using a metal behemoth that is measured in cubic feet (!), why not fit your home with an array of small fridge units that you can charge and store individually, using only the ones you need and carrying them wherever you want? Hey, is it our imagination, or are they exactly lunchbox-sized?
Images: Rich Anderson / design boom / The Design Blog