Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 16/03/2013
Event: Think tanks: in a resource-constrained world, we need a "circular economy"
Attribution: BBC Radio 4
People:
John Humphrys: Remember how we used to rent a television set, rather than buying one? When it broke - which it did, a lot - a man came out to mend it. Well, it seems we might be about to start doing the same with washing machines. Why not? The green lobby thinks it's a great idea, far better for the environment than chucking out a great big chunk of metal and wires, and buying a new one. Our Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin has been talking to people who think that this might be quite a revolution in the consumer society.
[Noise of washing machines operating.]
Roger Harrabin: The launderette may be in decline but it's not dying yet. The prospect of owning a temperamental metal box in the kitchen does not appeal to all.
Man 1: It's expensive to buy a washing machine in the first place, and maintaining it. 'Cause they roughly last up to about three years. Then you'd have to change it.
Man 2: I live with an eco-nazi. My daughter has become over the top. And she supports that we use the launderette, instead of having a washing machine, because she did the maths, and she said "Well, you know, if the machine's only going to last three to ten years, and you have to get it serviced and fixed - and the electricity, and it only does small loads, and, et cetera - it's just not worth it."
Roger Harrabin: A number of think tanks are coming to exactly that conclusion. Jocelyn Bleriot from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. for instance, has been pondering the impact of washing machines on the planet's resources. Each machine takes 30-40 kilograms of steel, and there's a world of difference, he says, in durability, between a cheap machine at the low end of the range and a top-end model.
Jocelyn Bleriot: A low-end washing machine is designed to last about 2000 cycles. So, if you compare five of these machines that can do 2000 cycles by one high-end washing machine that can do 10,000 cycles, the saving, in terms of steel, is about 180 kilos.
Roger Harrabin: So, 180 kilograms of steel is the difference, over a couple of decades, between buying one top-end washing machine and several cheap ones. That 180 kilos would build full-size statues of two average men and a six year-old boy.
Adey Grummet [singing]: You and I, and everyone, give birth to metal children every year...
Roger Harrabin: "Metal Children", composed by the Cambridge engineering researcher Julian Allwood, to provoke people to consider the amount of metal we all use. Julie Hill, from the think tank Green Alliance, is already on the case.
Julie Hill: I think maybe in future we'll find it extraordinary that we were willing to throw away, every three, four years, something with the huge amount of resource - metal and other materials - that a washing machine has.
Roger Harrabin: The answer, she says, is to abandon the old-fashioned notion that we have to own our washing machines.
Julie Hill: One way around it is to lease a washing machine, rather than buy it outright. So you'd have a company that would give you the service of washing, rather than you own the washing machine, so that would give an incentive to the companies who give us the machines to make them more durable, more easy to repair if they go wrong, more easy to upgrade, so we could just send them back, have them repaired and made more modern, more efficient, or whatever. And also have a really good route for treating them at the end of their life, so make sure either they're re-used - if they're still fit for that, or any of the components are fit - or definitely recycled.
Roger Harrabin: The think tanks say, in a resource-constrained world, we need what they call a "circular economy", where all products are designed to be repaired, upgraded, dismantled, re-used, then ultimately recycled. It would take a revolution in thinking, a revolution that might just begin with the washing machine.
John Humphrys: Roger Harrabin, reporting.