In Korean cafe, toaster sanitizes smartphones

The Green Toaster is a smartphone cleaning device placed in cafes, so users can sanitize their phone while they await their drink.

There are up to 7000 types of bacteria living on every smartphone, which is unsurprising considering how often they are used, but owners rarely think to clean them. Now, Green Toaster is a sanitizing device created by ad agency Innored and UK-based design school Kinneir Dufort for Korean e-commerce giant Gmarket, which will deep clean any smartphone using UV light, while the customer waits for their drink at a coffee shop.

To begin, users launch the Gmarket app on their smartphone before placing it one of two slots at the top of the Green Toaster. Then they pull down the lever, which draws the phone inside the device — mimicking the action of a normal toaster. The phone is then cleaned using UV light, which sanitizes and kills the micro-organisms on the phone. Once the process is complete, the toast pops up automatically.

Green Toaster is not the first phone sanitizing device on the market — a box that cleans phones while they charge overnight also uses UV-C light. But the Green Toaster’s design is fun and intuitive, and by placing it in the social environment of a cafe, it is likely to reach a wider audience and provides an interesting new advertising space for Gmarket. Are there other tech devices that could benefit from being integrated into public spaces?