Saving resources without sacrificing results: an empirical investigation of the dishwashing reality of British consumers in an international comparison

Routine household tasks, such as laundry or dishwashing, are complex socio-technical systems in which a variety of factors and actors interact, including manufacturers, technologies, regulators, consumer practices, cultural norms and infrastructures. A deep understanding of these socio-technical systems is necessary to find the right recommendations on how to optimise this system in order to achieve relevant savings in resource consumption without requiring a complete renewal of the infrastructure installed. In our case, we focus on automatic dishwashing in the United Kingdom and try to find out what an optimised consumer use of the dishwashers installed can look like and how many savings can be achieved. Accordingly, we modelled the base of dishwashers installed and conducted a consumer survey on dishwasher usage behaviour in sufficient detail to understand the interplay between the various factors. By simulating a change in usage behaviour, we find a potential energy saving of 21.3 % simply by following basic rules for selecting the appropriate programmes without the risk of a loss of performance.