Honey, you have a piece of coal between your teeth

Imagine that there is a small heap of black granules on your tooth brush. Shortly you are going to put the tooth brush in your mouth and massage the small black particles into the spaces between your nice teeth.

We are talking about active coal, and it has proved to be a bit of a panacea. The small black balls, which most of all resemble the poppy seeds that the baker spreads on your breakfast rolls, can be made from virtually any organic product, pine cones, coconut shells or bark. The trick is that the pine cones must be burnt without oxygen, because it leaves a pile of active coal in the fireplace, which, miraculously, can remove not only bacteria from the oral cavity, but also pesticides and dangerous chemicals.

Sara Breitenbauch has exploited that knowledge, and in her graduation project she has created several bowls and balls, among other things, which can detoxify all the fruits and vegetables we carry home from the supermarket.

- Nowadays we make a huge effort to constantly find new products and methods, but using active coal is in fact a technique that goes back several thousand years. It is a simple and natural process, and many women already use small sponges with active coal to cleanse their skin. The neat thing is that when the coals can no longer absorb the materials, the sponge crumbles and you can feed the remainder to your house plants where they perish. I have made use of this knowledge in my pottery, and I am surprised that no one has done this before, Sara Breitenbauch explains. She has studied industrial design at Design School Kolding.

Toilets and cooker hoods
Sara Breitenbauch interned with a ceramist, so it was familiar to her to design a fruit bowl made of bricks. Active coal has been mixed into the clay, and when fruit is placed in the bowl the active coal will in a short time detect the potential pesticides in the food, and in addition the fruit will stay fresh longer.

The young designer has also created a ball of clay, the size of an apple, which can be placed among the vegetables in the refrigerator, and even though the food items are not in direct contact with the ball it will still absorb the harmful substances. In addition the ball will get rid of the bad refrigerator smell we all know.

It sounds almost too good to be true, but the technique has been used in Japan for years and is indeed used in this country in toilets, cooker hoods and gas masks. But according to Sara Breitenbauch there is an enormous untapped potential when we talk about removing all the unwanted chemicals with which we surround ourselves.

- On a top 10 list of the most common ailments in this country allergies are number one, and I believe that active coal can play a decisive role in cleaning out the dangerous substances that surround us. For example many people sleep with a mobile phone next to their head, even though we know that the phones emit dangerous radiation. But if you place your mobile phone on a plate or in a cover with active coal, the dangerous brominating flame retardants disappear, explains Sara Breitenbauch, who has collaborated with a chemist from the conservation department of the National Museum of Denmark for her graduation project.

The only disadvantage related to active coal is that it does not last forever. But Sara Breitenbauch has thought of that as well. After about a year the fruit bowl can go into in the oven once more, after which it functions perfectly as a collector of toxins.