Every year Electrolux runs a design competition for new appliance ideas and usually the results are, will we say, a little whacky. This year Hungarian designer Levente Szab³ has won the 2007 Electrolux Design Lab competition with a concept for what is called “E-wash,” a washing machine that forgoes chemical detergent for one of our pet hates, soap nuts.
In India and Nepal, people have used the soap nut (sapindus mucorossi) for centuries to get their clothes clean. Szab³ says that a kilogram of soap nuts would last the typical person a year, and soap nuts are good for people with allergies and gentle on clothes.
We think primarily because they don’t actually do anything and there’s absolutely no evidence to show that they do. In fact any testing that has been carried out would tend to indicate that you’d be better just using water and not bothering with the soapnuts
You can read a lot more about soapnuts and their related alternative detergents in this article
Why Electrolux have gone with this is beyond us and we’d bet it’s not been tested as well as probably never seeing the light of day, for good reason we suspect.