Plastic is everywhere. It’s littering our oceans, and even has its own homeland: a behemoth floating mass of plastic known as the Pacific Garbage Patch or, as Planet Green called it in an informative guest post, the “Oh My”¦What Have We Done!?” Scientists say it’s twice the size of Texas (that still state-of-the-art term for Big) and growing. Already aware of this? Well, how about this? The demand for recycled plastic far exceeds its availability. So yeah, maybe we ought to do some fishing.

Electrolux certainly thinks so, as it hits the high seas (all of them, in fact), to gather plastic and make vacuum cleaners. Yep. Vacuum cleaners from the sea. (I so bet you never experienced that sentence before. Probably won’t ever again.) They’re even calling it that. Kinda. The company’s “Vac from the Sea” program “aims to bring attention to the issue of plastic pollution and at the same time combat the scarcity of recycled plastics needed for making sustainable home appliances.”

“There are plastic islands, some several times the size of the state of Texas [See! Everyone loves to say that!], floating in our oceans,” says Cecilia Nord, Vice President, Floor Care Environmental and Sustainability Affairs, Electrolux. “Yet on land, we struggle to get hold of enough recycled plastics to meet the demand for sustainable vacuum cleaners. What the world needs now is a better plastic karma.”

Unfortunately, we’re all not going to be able to buy into the program, as they plan to only make a limited number of these suckers, which will be “put on display to decision makers and consumers as part of spreading the word.” The plastic debris will be “harvested” from the Pacific, Indian, Atlantic (which has its very own “patch,” recently fearlessly explored by one of our writers), and Mediterranean oceans, as well as the Baltic and North seas, by diving, fishing and scavenging. It’s hardly an assault on the mainland of that floating Texas, but it’s a start.

If you’re looking to get involved or follow the program’s progress, check out their blog and Facebook pages. Oh, and there’s a cool little video posted over at Crisp Green, too.

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Something green and gooey in the fridge is usually a bad sign. I say that with solemn deference to my mother’s yummy lime JELL-O mold Passover staple, complete with magically floating mandarin orange slices (which, despite its annual holiday role, still seems to me to be distinctly non-Jewish in appearance). I’ll go so far, though, as to call my mother’s (and her mother’s before her) trembling creation an exception to the rule and return to my original premise: Green goo + fridge = bad.

Aha, but not necessarily so! At least not necessarily so in Electrolux’s goofy future world where Yuriy Dmitriev’s Bio Robot Refrigerator serves up a non-sticky, odorless biopolymer gel (yes, it’s green – in the pictures anyway) that’s not only not a bad thing to have in your fridge, it actually pretty much is your fridge.

The (very) experimental design was one of 25 finalists in the Electrolux Design Lab 2010, a competition that asked industrial design students to “create home appliances that consider shrinking domestic spaces.” Winning ideas were required to “shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050 when 74 percent of the world’s population are predicted to live in an urban environment” dictating a need for greater space efficiency.

Four times smaller than a conventional refrigerator, Dmitriev’s Bio Robot’s biopolymer gets its food-preserving coolness through luminescence. All you do is grab your eggs (or whatever) and shove “˜em in the goo, which morphs around your foodstuffs creating “a separate pod that suspends items for easy access.” There’s no doors or drawers or motor, so more than 90 percent of the device is doing the good work you need to keep your eats fresh – if not appetizing. The thing can be hung vertically, horizontally, or “even on the ceiling.” Quite the space saver.

Inhabitat’s Britt Liggett, provides us with a few more details, noting that the cooling agents are the “bio robots” inherent in the gel that use luminescence. The device uses zero energy for cooling (it just needs energy for its little control pad), compared to the typical modern fridge, which uses about eight percent of a household’s energy.

Oh, and I love this little kicker from the Electrolux site: “Products in plain view and easily accessible.” Oh yum.

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