Why Repairing Home Appliances Benefits the Environment

Is it better to toss out your old appliance and purchase a new, energy-efficient model? Sometimes, yes. Most of the time, however, it’s much better for the environment to hold onto older home appliances.

01. It Reduces Demand for Newly Produced Appliances

Your individual choice to delay the purchase of a brand new refrigerator probably won’t make a big dent in the production schedules of major refrigerator manufacturers, but if more people took care of their current appliances then manufacturers would have fewer incentives to mass-produce new appliances in such large quantities.

Appliance manufacturing is time, labour, and energy-intensive, but of course, it uses lots of natural resources, many of which are extracted from the earth.

02. Reduction in Electronic Waste

When one thinks of e-waste in Australia, it’s easy to consider mobile phones, television sets, and other common consumer electronics but we perhaps don’t consider white goods around the home. For decades, appliances have mostly been analog devices, simply performing their duties with an electrical or gas connection.

Today’s appliances are increasingly being made ‘smart’ with electronic components that generate an enormous quantity of e-waste due to the rare earth minerals, mercury, cadmium, and other substances that leach into ground soils when discarded.

Holding onto your white goods for a few more years lessens the impact on the e-waste problem, one that is currently at a global tipping point (pun intended) and requires great efforts to resolve.

03. Reduction in Shipping & Logistics Costs

Having new appliances ordered and delivered to your front door, installed by technicians, and so on requires resources and consumes petrochemicals not only from the lorry or van delivering your appliance but also from further upstream in the supply chain.

Delay purchasing a brand new appliance if feasible to do so and you will help to contribute to fewer emissions as a result.

04. Energy Consumption

Generally, most newer appliances are more energy-efficient and the Energy Star Australia rating system does a pretty good job of telling homeowners how much electricity an appliance will consume. Older models tend to be less eco-friendly, but that’s not always the case. Older, more simpler appliances might use marginally more energy than a newer model, but there’s nothing stopping you from disconnecting the appliance when not in use.

For some appliances, this probably isn’t practical (refrigerators and freezers), but for appliances seldom used it can make a big difference in your energy bill by simply disconnecting the appliance when not in use.

05. Easier to Repair Older Appliances?

Yes, it’s something that many have been clamouring about for years now. Whether it’s all a big conspiracy or not, many are afraid that big appliance manufacturers are creating planned obsolescence for their appliances.

One of the problems that many domestic appliance repairmen face is that for brand new appliances, replacement parts are purposely made all-proprietary by the manufacturer. Instead of using replaceable parts (which would make sense, right?) they purposely engineer similar replacements with the caveat that you can only order replacements from them at a considerable cost, which leads many to simply toss out the appliance and purchase a new one.

By choosing to repair an older appliance, you might be able to offset this problem and have the appliance repaired quickly and with quality parts from a reputable domestic appliance repair technician.

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