Imagine a fundamentally different sort of refrigerator–one that offers complete visibility of all your food while consuming a boatload less energy than even today’s most energy-efficient models. Russian designer Yuriy Dmitriev did, and the result is a concept fridge that uses nothing more than some cooling agents suspended in gel to keep foods fresh.

Like the micro-dishwasher concept we recently covered here at ET, the Bio Robot Refrigerator was created for the Electrolux Design Lab Competition, which asks designers to re-imagine today’s appliances for the future; like that dishwasher, the technical details on this bold new fridge are a little sketchy. Suffice to say that the cooling agents in that crazy green gel are “bio robots” that use luminescence — light generated in cold temperatures — to preserve food. Using the fridge is as simple as shoving your food right into that biopolymer gel (which Inhabitat assures us has no odor and is not sticky), where it will hang, miraculously suspended in its cool environs, until you should happen to feel peckish.

image via Inhabitat

While there are some definite issues with this concept (Wouldn’t a head of romaine lettuce wind up with green gel caught up in its leaves? Is the gel strong enough to hold up a jug of Sunny D?), there hasn’t been a whole lot done with the electricity-hogging fridge since the advent of freon-based models in the 1950′s. The Bio Robot Fridge concept exhibits some original thinking on the subject, and best of all, it’s a zero-energy appliance.

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