Washing as a Service - Quantifying the Environmental Impact of a pay-per-use washing machine through Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

In order to live more sustainably on this planet, the world’s population needs to transform the current take-make dispose society towards a society with more maintainable consumption patterns and more sustainable business models. A way to achieve this, is a circular economy in which value is maintained within the product cycle, by sharing, repairing, reusing, refurbishing and recycling. Product-service systems, such as leasing, sharing and pay-per-use models, are presented as a way to contribute to the circular economy. Product-service systems (PSS) could potentially reduce environmental impacts, however, PSS do not automatically lead to positive environmental impacts and not all PSS are by default environmentally benign. Therefore, several authors call for quantifications of PSS’ environmental impacts, because the benefits of PSS remain inexplicit in literature and are mostly qualitatively described. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a common method to evaluate the environmental impacts over a product’s lifecycle. LCAs compare the function that products or services fulfil over their entire life cycle and over various impact categories. As such, they provide an appropriate method to assess PSS’ environmental impacts.