It’s always nice when an invention provides an equal or greater benefit than what we currently use, while being much better for the environment. The Philips Microbial Home is a refreshing fusion of cutting-edge green technology and centuries-old know-how that has fallen into disuse (do you know anyone with a larder in their home?).
The concept tries to be as much of a closed loop as possible, with waste from one component serving as fuel or fertilizer for the next. The “home” features the following components:
The Larder is, well, a larder. They were commonplace until electricity (and refrigerators) made them obsolete, but in many ways they’re better at preserving food than our electric humidity boxes. This implementation is essentially a terracotta tray that grows and stores your veggies.
The Bio-Digester Kitchen Island integrates a cooking range, lighting fixture, hot water heater and a kitchen table; it operates using methane released from bathroom and kitchen waste. It’s the rustic-looking contraption in the above photo.
Providing all that methane is a water-free squatting toilet. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of using one of these in your travels abroad, you’ll probably stick to your good old flushing model. As for your plastic bottles, they can be recycled using the wooden device rightmost in the photo that uses bacteria to slowly decompose the plastic.
In the cool-but-not-necessarily-useful category we find the “urban beehive” (a honey-producing version of an ant farm) and a lamp filled with luminescent bacteria that live in glass cells and feed off the methane sludge (I want one).
The one I’m really looking forward to is what Philips labels the “apothecary“, a network of sensors in the washroom that monitor your health on an instant, daily basis. It’s quite a bit like what Michio Kaku detailed in his book Physics of the Future – sensors in your mirror, toilet and toothbrush could monitor practically everything, from the colour of your skin to the bacteria in your mouth. This would be a phenomenal way to provide early detection for diseases like cancer that can’t really be “cured” (cellular mutation happens all the time) but would be almost trivial to get rid of if detected at the microscopic level. That “apothecary” would be one of the greatest medical innovations ever.