Creative Industry
"solar-powered" fridge
Emily Cummins
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• Emily Cummins is a 20 year old ethical
inventor and entrepreneur studying
Management and Sustainability at Leeds
University. Her latest invention is a sustainable
fridge, which runs without the need for
electricity.
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• Emily developed the fridge during her selffunded gap year in Africa, where she hopes it
will make a massive contribution to improving
medical services – its primary purpose is to be
used to transport and store temperaturesensitive drugs.
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• In a corrugated metal shack in Namibia two
years ago, a teenager called Emily Cummins
watched a woman trying to care for 25
children. "Some of them were just in day care
while their parents were at work," she says,
"some of their parents just didn't want them.
Some were HIV positive." And the nursery
manager's life wasn't made any easier by the
fact that the children's goat's milk kept turning
[was destroyed]in the heat.
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• Emily Cummins, now 21, always wanted to be
an inventor.
• For her design and technology school project
she spent a day following her granddad,
seeing what daily tasks he found difficult.
"Toothpaste turned out to be an unexpected
problem," she says. "Because of his arthritis
he couldn't squeeze, so I invented a
toothpaste dispenser, which he loved."
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• At the award ceremony she was deeply moved by
a speech by Ed Gillespie (creative Director of
Futerra) on global warming and the problems of
the Third World.
• She asked her friends: what's the one electrical
device you couldn't do without? The answer was
a fridge. So she set her mind to making a fridge
that wouldn't need electricity and could be made
from sustainable materials.
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• Her "solar-powered" fridge is made from two
aluminium cylinders (the third most abundant
element on Earth), which use little energy, are
easily recyclable and work on the principle of
evaporation.
• The gap between the cylinders is packed with
wool, and water percolates from the reservoir
into the wool, slowly evaporates, and takes heat
out of the inner tube.
• A clever trick in design terms. And a potential lifesaver for the Third World.
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• On a gap year she travelled to Africa with
prototypes. "I was working at a hospital in
Namibia and one of the guys who worked
there lived in a township. I went to stay with
him to see how the fridge could work. It was
pretty exciting! We'd put liquid butter and
chocolate inside and they'd come out solid.
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• "I'd watch women stringing up fish to dry in
the sun. It'd be covered in flies or stolen, my
fridge would make a big difference. At first
people would laugh, then I'd teach them how
to make it. The people there made one using a
water butt on the outside and an old car door
inside. It was incredible."
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
• Cummins isn't your average entrepreneur. "I'm
not in it for the money. My idea is that I'll just
distribute leaflets around the Third World
helping people make their own fridges. I'm
also working on an improved design that cools
to a controlled level of 4ºC — the temperature
you need to transport pharmaceuticals. It
would be incredible to get that out into the
world."
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• Most recently Emily was named the
Technology Woman of the Future 2006 and
the British Female Innovator of the Year for
2007
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Creative Industry -"solar-powered" fridge
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