In dishcleaning automatic dishwashers do clearly win over manual cleaning when it comes to efficiency: Resources can be saved without compromising on hygiene. But mistakes in the usage behaviour can equalize saving advantages. Consumers in nine countries, covering different regions of the world, were asked about their dishcleaning behaviour to identify if this household work is done in a resource saving way. By analysing mistakes in the current behaviour, the potential of water savings shall be estimated. K E Y W O R D S automatic dishwashing, consumer behaviour, dishwasher, household appliances, household technology, sustainability, sustainable household behaviour, water usage 472 | bs_bs_banner BELKE Et aL.(2011) measured 17.0% usage frequency for the eco-programme, Stamminger and Streichardt (2009) 17.7%. This shows the need of increasing the usage of the resource saving eco-programme.The high parallel use of manual and automatic dishwashing is increasing the water consumption in households with automatic dishwashers (Forum Waschen, 2017). Not all dish pieces are considered as eligible to be cleaned in an automatic dishwasher. Symbols on the dish items may indicate if it is dishwasher safe, but pictograms are not understood by all consumers (verbraucherzentrale Thüringen [VZTH], 2015). So, on one hand, consumers need to get a better overview which items can securely be cleaned in a dishwasher, and on the other hand, their manual dishcleaning needs to be performed in a resource saving way too.Dish items that are not dishwasher safe (or not considered as dishwasher safe) or are too bulky to be placed onto the automatic dishwasher, are the reason, that manual cleaning is performed in almost every household, automatic dishwasher being available or not.But as the number of manually cleaned pieces is low in households with automatic dishwashers, manual dishwashing tends to be even more inefficient in these households: A research by Stamminger et al. (2007) has shown, that the water consumption per dish item is higher, when cleaned in smaller accumulations. 46 participants had to clean 12 place settings by hand in one session and consumed around 100 L. Then, the 12 place settings were split into 6 coupleslike occurring on two days in a two-person household-and the water consumption raised to 125 L. Therefore a sustainable manual dishcleaning method is also of high importance in households with automatic dishwashers, where individual dishes are cleaned manually.This was researched by Fuß and Stamminger (2010) who found by experiments a best practice method of manual dishcleaning. Applying this learning on a sample of households in Spain andGermany showed large saving potential, mainly depending on the way how the dishcleaning was done before: The change from cleaning under running tap water to cleaning in a sink saved enormous amounts of water (and energy). But this technique of cleaning in a sink is rarely applied in households: Running tap water use is common practice (Berkholz et al., 2013;Maitra, Belke, Stamminger...

Over recent decades, water conservation have become increasingly an utmost important issue for debate, and this includes the domestic sector. Reducing demand water by improving the efficiency of water use in domestic sector requires an understanding of how water is used and in what ways water savings can be realized. The focus of this global, web‐based, consumer questionnaire survey was to analyze individual consumer attitudes towards using water in manual dishwashing and understand the likelihood of a prospect of changing the daily manual dishwashing method resulting to a more efficient domestic usage of water. This study was designed to investigate the manual dishwashing technique used in the 5249 households of nine different countries ‐ China, Germany, Italy, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, India, South Africa and Argentina. Besides socio‐demographics, technical questions like cleaning steps, hygiene questions motivational question, environmental awareness questions, questions on payment for water and electricity, questions on information sources about household work were included in the study. It was found that the awareness to conserve water was common among the Asian participants but it necessarily was not practiced in the households as individual washing of dishes was found to be quite high. Among the many outcomes, important one was that ‘running tap method’ was found to be most prevalent (86%) among Russian participants, complimenting their detached approach towards conserving domestic water usage. In South American countries like Brazil (66%) and Argentina (51%), high occurrence of ‘running tap rinse’ was found to be a common practice, confirming the lack of conscious use of water in manual dishwashing in the subcontinent. Based on the overall responses, awareness of a new and efficient technique of manual dishwashing could be propagated through the most voted mediums of Internet (81%) and TV (69%).