The R2B2 Human Powered Kitchen Appliance Concept

The R2B2 is a wonderful green kitchen appliance concept designed by Christoph Thetard and showcased at the recent Milan Furniture Fair. It uses a sustainable human powered flywheel to drive the spinning blade that allows you to blend, process and grind your food. Very Flintstone-ish, and eco-friendly!

According to Christoph:

Each year the amount of electronic junk is enlarged by additional 50 million tons worldwide. Most of the electronic devices can be found in everyone‘s household especially in kitchens. The latter consists of dozen kitchenware ranging from the old-school mixer to juicer or coffee grinder that all soon or later will increase the amount of waste.
Considering this negative trend, in 2010 Christoph Thetard developed a piece of kitchen equipment that allows you to counteract this development: R2B2. It combines three kitchen appliances with a central driving unit. The heart of the unit is a manually empowered flywheel which works as an energy storage and powers the appliances mechanically and directly.
After extensive studies, a kitchen machine, a coffee grinder and a hand blender were chosen to stand representatively for a lot of other possible appliances. Everything is built up on easy to separate and long life materials. The design is timeless and the technique is very basic and easy to understand. Chopping herbs, grinding cheese or mixing cocktails – all tasks are accomplished with a few pedal kicks only and nearly silent.

It also looks like Christoph is going to put his project on Kickstarter. So we would like to wish him the best of luck in getting this project realized!