Benefits to natural and social environments
The retail price of domestic appliances continues to fall while the costs of repair continues to rise.
While this maintains buoyant sales for retailers and manufacturers, what is the cost to the environment?
Each year an increasing number of machines have their lives ended prematurely, not because they cannot be repaired, but because it is too expensive to repair them
Whether this is a deliberate policy to over-price repairs to drive sales or whether it is driven by public demand for increasingly low priced appliances is open for debate what is not is that:
- Since 2001 over 200,000 additional washing machines go to land fill every year due to this practice, plus ovens, hobs, hoods, dishwashers, fridges, freezers, microwaves etc on top of that!
- Raw materials needed to feed the increased sales is more damaging and polluting than energy savings being made by newer appliances
- There is a huge increase in gas emissions from production and transportation from developing economies that are making more and more of the white goods purchased in the UK
- In addition to the above there is the production, shipping and disposal of all the packaging used on these new appliances, much of which cannot be re-cycled
The WEEE Directive attempts to address the environmental damage associated with carcass disposal but it does nothing to address machine lifespan and thus ignores harmful green house gas emissions during production and distribution of new appliances.
The best way to reduce waste is to make machines last longer, but it is not that simple.
Some brands of machines do on average go longer without breaking down than others with the general rule of thumb being the more you pay the longer it lasts; however what really dictates the reliability of a machine is how it is installed, how often you use it, how regularly you do maintenance washes and what you put in it.
Numerous machines are damaged shortly after purchase by people not removing transit packing, not plumbing them in correctly and not levelling them. Some of this damage can be very serious, sometimes terminal.
A machine which is used once a day will wear out quicker than one used once a week
Regular service washing reduces the built up of surplus detergent and reduces lime scale yet how many people have ever carried out a service wash let alone do one once a month as recommended.
Not checking pockets thoroughly can result in hard objects such as coins screws smashing the drum or paper, net curtains, bath mats can disintegrate blocking drainage systems. For more detail and more laundry tips and the above see www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk
The above will dictate how long your washing machine will go without needing a repair, how long it goes before it ends up as scrap is dictated by how much that repair will cost.