The 40-year-old dishwasher
That is how I found Paul and Carmel Sarks of Strathfield. Take a deep breath. Their Miele dishwasher is 40 years old and it’s perfect.
“I make sure everything is fairly reasonable before it goes in,” says Carmel. “I’m very careful with it. Scrape the dishes. If they are really messy, I might rinse.”
Also, Paul and Carmel are assiduous cleaners of the filter in their vintage Miele.
So what happens to all the dead dishwashers and other large appliances?
John Gertsakis, director of the Product Stewardship Centre of Excellence, says around 90 per cent of used products are being collected with just over half of the material is recycled. The rest ends up in landfill.
Plastics and ozone-depleting gases (in fridges and heat pump dryers) can be difficult to recover and, says Gertsakis, only a handful of brands removes old appliances when a new product is sold and delivered. The rest end up in the back lane waiting for council collections.
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Gertsakis says: “We need a regulated product stewardship program that enables more whitegoods to be repaired and recycled. That’s well overdue in Australia.”
In comparison, he says, the European Commission laws require manufacturers to fund and participate in repair and recycling schemes.
That would have been great for me. Instead, nearly two grand for a new top-level Bosch dishwasher with all the cycles and three shelves, as well as the callout for the repairer. That’s on top of not really knowing what went wrong.
In our case, it wasn’t the cockroaches, which Barnes says cause mayhem. They love the warmth and the wetness and they destroy dishwashers. What can you do about that? Cockroach baits, keeping the area around them clean, and some experts suggest a lanolin wax spray.
Gertsakis says that, with the support of the Southern Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, his team modelled what it would cost to get industry to fund collection, recycling of large house appliances and improve the repairability of appliances – a levy of $49 per appliance. It would create nearly 500 new jobs in the repair sector. They also interviewed those in the industry and found strong support for a co-designed stewardship scheme.
Could I live without a dishwasher? Maybe. But I’d be bloody grumpy. I speak to an old mate, Julie Macken, of Chippendale. In all her many decades on this earth, she has never had a dishwasher. She has a partner, three kids, four grandkids, 10 brothers and sisters. Big, big dinners. And who does the washing-up? She does.
Family arguments have broken out about the best way to pack the dishwasher.Credit: iStock
“My mother doesn’t have a dishwasher either,” says Macken. “Dishwashers are not on my emotional map.”
Her partner does all the cooking, she clears up. They talk and talk and talk. But there’s also the chance to chat while stacking as those of us with two contrasting styles of dishwasher stacking know: the Scandinavian architect (not me) and a “raccoon on meth” (not my significant other).
Want to argue about the benefits of dishwashers? Sure. But here’s what the experts say. Dishwashers save on water compared to handwashing. And that’s not all. One study showed households with dishwashers used nearly 30 per cent less energy per cleaned item compared with households not owning a dishwasher.
Let’s hope our next one lasts longer than five years.
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