This is sad news from an environmental standpoint as, according to a new report by Grand View Research in the USA washing machine sales are set to increase to almost double the present volumes.
It should be noted that Grand View Research (GRV) do take into account commercial laundry machines as well as domestic so there is a caveat as they reckon that commercial machines will largely drive the growth but they do note that connected washing machines are also a driver in growth of use.
We can’t see people rushing out to buy connected appliances but what do we know!
The problem is that a lot of these predictions are reliant of figures from manufacturers who, get their figures from goodness only knows where on what people are going to buy next, probably market research companies.
What cannot be denied is that washing machine sales have massively increased as we report only a short time ago in this article and, it’s not a good thing. As this graph of German washing machines demostrates:
Germany washing machine market, by product, 2014 – 2025 (USD Billion)
One of the take away points form this report is that manufacturers appear to be hedging their bets that connected machines will gain traction, with the usual suspects for this sort of thing LG and Samsung being cited as moving towards all connected appliances. Of course LG and Samsung are hoping for a competitive advantage but with flaky implementations, security concerns and buyers that don’t seem to care about connected appliances we don’t know that the effort will pay off.
All this side show over connected appliances however doesn’t detract from the core message here, the report reckons that we’ll go from $22.99 billion worth of washing machines in 2015 to over $42 billion by 2025.
That’s not good.
It gets worse though as, this looks at the value and the problem there is (as anyone with commons sense will see) is that the retail values of washing machines have been dropping year on year so, it’s almost double the value but could be significantly more in terms of waste.
And that, is really not good at all.
The polar bears are weeping again…
