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Last time I had an ant infestation in the kitchen, I sprayed them dead with bleach. I dealt with water bugs by encouraging my stealthy and deadly cat to leave them like crunchy mints on his loving parents’ pillows. And I doubt I’m the only one who can’t get excited about cohabitating with cockroaches.
That’s why I’m surprised I have to say this: If there’s a bug in my kitchen, I want it dead. Also, I don’t want my morning coffee anywhere near my toilet bowl. I just can’t overlook these basic psychological needs—even if ignoring them might help the environment.
How to Eat Fried Worms
This Ekokook kitchen profiled over at Dezeen cleverly deals with all your kitchen’s environmental issues, including gray water, composting, and planting. But I just can’t get past the fact that the composting is done with worms. In your kitchen. Under your cooktop. Near your food. All that environmentalism can’t make me ignore the fact that it puts bugs in the kitchen.
Yes, composting is good. Yes, worms are very efficient at creating compost. But there isn’t enough bleach and antibacterial cleaner to ever make me put worms in my kitchen, no matter how good it is for the environment. Worms should be near my baby spinach when it’s in my garden, not when it’s in my steamer.
Peeing in a Cup
The Home Core concept for the bathroom spotted at Yanko Design allows you to save and reuse water, but it also comes with another serious ick factor. The pivoting, all-in-one design puts the sink and tabletop with an ever-useful cup holder (yes, that is a coffee cup) right over your toilet. Because your toilet is the obvious location to enjoy a doughnut and coffee. Maybe I’m unusual, but I prefer to have my coffee in my kitchen (you know, with the worms). If there’s anything I want less than insects near my food and beverages, it has to be my toilet.
It’s good to see designers working to solve serious environmental problems, but with concepts like these, they’ve done so at the expense of actually making them desirable to the general public. It doesn’t matter how much water you save if the very idea of using it makes you feel dirty.
3 Responses to “You Make Me Feel Dirty: Icky Eco Kitchen and Bathroom Designs”
[...] The “Go with the Flow” yoga toilet. Those are two words you probably never thought you’d see together. Yoga. Toilet. But hey, it’s green (flushes with used sink water) so it must be good. I like green as much as the next person, but you have to agree that sometimes green is just another way of saying ick. [...]
Completely agree! No worms in the kitchen and the toilet is scary!
[...] And speaking of nastily grotesque kitchen designs… [...]