Hasta La Ideas

Philips has put together a fascinating, comprehensive and holistic green home system called the Microbial Home Probe, now on display at Dutch Design week. The conceptual domestic ecosystem tackles the issues of energy, lighting, food preparation, cleaning, and human waste disposal, embodied in a series of different components, with some impressively outside-the-box thinking.

The Bio-Digester Island is moveable kitchen island that serves not only as a food-prep station, but doubles as the home’s energy hub. The cutting board surface directly adjoins a vegetable waste grinder, which in turn feeds into a “digester” that uses bacteria to break down organic waste. The resultant methane gas is used to power the gas range, heat household water, and run the overhead lights.

The Larder is both the dining room table and an indoor garden, meant to supplant a refrigerator by providing a no-electricity-required evaporative cooler in the center of the table, whose cooling action is paradoxically powered by heat from the methane digester mentioned above. Overhead, fresh vegetables are grown in varieties that depend on what the local climate will allow.

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