Are lifetimes of big appliances really shrinking?

(Press-News.org) Big appliances, like washing machines, ovens and refrigerators, are a major investment for many households. Consumers hope that these appliances will last for decades. More and more, however, people have the perception that these big-ticket items might not be lasting as long as they once did.

But when Kamila Krych looked at actual trends in product lifetimes as a part of her PhD research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Industrial Ecology Programme, she found that wasn’t quite true.

“Despite what people think, there is no evidence that product lifetimes are decreasing,” she said. “Many people think that products have been becoming less durable. But this work suggests that no, that’s not entirely true.”

Well, aside from two big-ticket items: washing machines and ovens.

The big exceptions Krych looked at a range of data on large appliances in Norwegian households, starting from the time they were first adopted in the country. For refrigerators, washing machines and ovens, this was starting in 1950.

Other appliances didn’t find their way into Norwegian households until several decades later. That was true for dishwashers, freezers and tumble dryers.

For almost all of these appliances, their lifetimes stayed roughly the same across the decades. That was not the case for washing machine or ovens, however.

Washing machine lifetimes decreased by 45 per cent, meaning that their lifetime decreased from 19.2 to 10. 6 years, while ovens decreased from 23.6 years to 14.3 years (39 per cent).

"If planned obsolescence or another single factor was to blame, we would expect the same decreasing trend across all appliances. Instead, we only found it for washing machines and ovens," she said.

Why was this true just for these two appliances?

Cleaner lifestyles? To find the answer, Krych dug deeper into published information on consumer preferences and details about the appliances themselves.

With washing machines, “it’s pretty simple,” she said. The lifetime of an appliance isn’t necessarily how many years the product lasts, but may be more closely related to how many cycles it runs.

“For washing machines, what matters is how often you run it. And there has been a documented large change in laundry habits,” she said. “People do the laundry much more often now than in the past.”

Krych found a 2003 study that showed that in 1960, an average Norwegian family of four did a laundry twice a week. By 2000, this number had quadrupled to 8 washing cycles a week for that family of four.“This obviously can have an influence on lifetimes of washing machines,”  she said.

For ovens, however, the story is a little more complicated.

Changes in electronics and kitchen trends Krych’s research didn’t directly address how people used their kitchens, but she was able to look at published research on societal trends in Norway over the decades.

“Ovens used to be very durable, and historically lifetimes were high, because oven design is very simple,” she said.

But Krych found other research that showed roughly 40 per cent of all ovens in Norway are discarded when they are still functioning. That’s a rate that is higher than other household appliances.

Another trend she saw in her own research was that the lifetimes of other appliances in Norwegian kitchens, such as refrigerators and dishwashers, was also converging – meaning that all of these appliances had about the same lifetimes.

“This is circumstantial evidence, but this points to the importance of kitchen renovation,” she said.  “And right now, we often have all of these appliances integrated in kitchen cupboards. And because of how expensive things are in Norway, it's often much easier to discard everything at once when you renovate your kitchen than to keep your oven for longer, even though it still works.”

Another change that social scientists have identified, Krych said, is the change in the way the kitchen is used in Norwegian households.

“There is lots of social science research that says we use kitchens differently now than we used to in the past,” she said. “People often have kitchens integrated with their living rooms. And this means that the look of the kitchen matters much more.”

Changing consumer behaviour Current policies in the EU designed to help cut the overall environmental impact of consumer consumption have focused on product durability and incentives for repairing products.

Krych says that’s a good goal but thinks that policymakers could benefit from including social factors, such as changes in lifestyles, into their planning.“Product lifetimes are not only about how long the product can last, but also what people do with them,” she said.

Reference: Krych, K. & Pettersen, J. B. (2025). Long-term lifetime trends of large appliances since the introduction in Norwegian households. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13608

END