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The Eco-Friendly Nutshell Cooler Performs Better Than Styrofoam-Filled Coolers

The magic ingredient: Coconut husk waste, an excellent insulator

By Rain Noe - August 19, 2021

in Sustainability | Materials

David Cutler is a designer. Tamara Mekler is a Behavioral Biologist. While gaining their respective graduate degrees at Stanford, the duo traveled to the Philippines to collaborate on a school project to improve the design of fish packaging.

In one of those curveballs that life throws you, Cutler and Mekler found themselves learning about another industry in the Philippines: Coconut farming. They learned that that industry's waste is coconut husks, which were considered worthless. Farmers burn them in bonfires just to get rid of them.

However, when Cutler and Mekler investigated the material, they found it had some potentially very useful properties, if it could be connected to another industry:

"Coconut husk fibers are hollow and contain tons of tiny trapped air pockets--the same exact structure that plastic foam insulation uses to reduce heat transfer (i.e. conduction). In fact, if you compare Expanded Polystyrene foam (EPS, a.k.a. Styrofoam) and coconut fiber side by side under a microscope, you'll hardly see a difference. Yet every cooler brand, and almost every outdoor gear company, relies on polluting plastic foam insulation without thinking twice about it."

Cutler and Mekler subsequently figured out a way to process the husks into sheets of insulating material. They also teamed up with design firm Box Clever to design this eco-friendly, collapsible soft-sided Nutshell Cooler:

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The performance sounds nothing short of amazing:

"Nutshell kept ice frozen for more than 48 hours in our tests, outperforming the Yeti Hopper Two, Coleman Excursion, Styrofoam, and several other coolers in identical conditions. There are many variables that affect ice retention including contents of the cooler, ratio of ice, original ice temperature, type of ice (crushed, block, cube), ambient temperature, exposure to direct sunlight, etc. Therefore, we can't tell you exactly how long ice will last inside your Nutshell, but we can tell you it will last longer than it would have inside most plastic alternatives."

At press time the Nutshell Cooler had been successfully Kickstarted, with $69,572 in pledges on a $30,000 goal, with 27 days left to pledge. Congratulations to Cutler and Mekler!

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George Graham

3 years ago

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Hmnn. So yet again we have some people professing to "discover" the "miracle" properties of an "overlooked" and "underutilised" resource. Helping some benighted third world farmers move their product into the 21st century and saving the world with their "new" green product. I hope the poor farmers were appropriately grateful. This is just coir fibres people. It's been traded and used for hundreds of years. Alongside copra it's the main reason why coconuts are grown. It's been made into insulation for at least the past sixty years. This is nothing but ridiculous self aggrandising greenwashing.

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Donald Jones

3 years ago

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Mom had these for the beach, when we were kids in the 60's. They came in plaid, either red or green.

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George Mokray

3 years ago

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Saw some people processing coconut by hand for coconut candy in the Mekong Delta when I visited there in January 2020. They have it down to a science and produce a LOT of coconut husks. May this idea take off - for more than just portable coolers.

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Billy Mack

3 years ago

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This is novel, and pretty cool...no pun intended.

Watching the processing gif makes me wonder if the "tiny air pockets" inherent to the material are intact in the final sheet form of the product. It seems as if the husks get chopped up.

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- daniel scott
  
  Billy Mack
  
  3 years ago
  
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  I think the tiny air pockets are within the individual fibres, the space between them in the matting surely helps too.
  
  always curious about these waste material sources, similarly with the Freitag airbag bag; how often the demand outpaces the supply. Rarely if ever, i guess.
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