A recent disturbing statistic says that Americans throw away almost 50 percent of the food they buy. The main reason for this is that food “goes bad” or no longer looks appealing to eat. What’s needed is a better way to store it so that it stays fresher longer. The National Award Winner from Spain of the James Dyson 2013 Award would do just that.

 

The OLTU, a system that uses the heat generated by refrigerators and uses the same to cool vegetables, was created by industrial designer Fabio Molinas. This innovative system uses the wasted heat generated by the back of a refrigerator and cools vegetables with it via evaporation. Using double walled clay containers, as the heat rises, the water contained between those walls helps lower the temperature of the containers, creating an ideal temperature for the veggies they contain.

The benefits of this are that the veggies stay fresher because they’re stored just right and there are no additional cooling or energy costs. This makes it easy to use, inexpensive to maintain and sustainable too.

This is a super useful concept – and a good lookking one at that. Hopefully it will make it to the consumer market as well.