Hungarian student wins prestigious "green" design award

Levente Szabó, a student at Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, has won the 2007 Electrolux Design Laboratory competition with an environmentally friendly washing machine he calls "E-Wash."

Courtesy Origo.hu

Mr. Green: Hungarian design student Levente Szabó and his "E-Wash" clothes-washing machine, which this week won the 2007 Electrolux Design Laboratory competition

The competition is open annually to students in industrial design both at the graduate and undergraduate level, and focuses on developing innovative ideas for household appliances.

Szabó answered the company's call this year for environmentally sound, commercially-viable household products by looking for natural materials suitable as detergents. He found the soapnut - sapindus mucorossi - which has been used for centuries in India and Nepal as a natural cleaning agent. Szabó said that a typical user would go through just a kilogram of soap nuts in a whole year, while the nuts are less likely than "traditional" detergents to provoke allergic reactions among users.

Meanwhile, Szabó's entry challenged the form of the conventional washing machine. He reduced its size and made it flatter - to better fit into smaller spaces - while maintaining the machine's performance. According to Szabó, the new method of washing he developed is more gentle.

His breakthrough won him a cash award of €5,000 and a six-month internship at one of the Swedish company's design centers.

"E-wash is a brilliant connection between ancient knowledge and high-tech," said Henrik Otto, head of global design for Electrolux, and a member of the jury for the competition. "It takes someone open-minded to look for solutions from somewhere else and apply them to his own culture."

The washing machine beat a solar-powered air filter, a water-saving shower, a device that turns plastic into garden compost and an organic waste decomposer to the first prize.

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