Washing laundry is one of the most widespread housework in the world. Today, washing machines do this work in many private households, using water, electricity, chemical substances, and process time. Although energy efficiency is in the focus of many regulations which have already achieved significant improvements, the question remains, how relevant these processes are in terms of the absolute impact on resources and whether there are possibilities to improve even further by looking abroad. This survey, which is based on published data, compares the energy and water consumption for automatic laundry washing in an average private household with the total energy and water consumption of private households. Only little data are available on resource consumption for laundry washing and reliable figures based on in-use measurements are hard to obtain. But although some of the data in this report are poor, this is the first work that tries to elucidate the contribution of automatic laundry washing to the total electricity and water consumption of households in selected countries worldwide. The report estimates the resource consumption of roughly 590,000,000 washing machines in 38 countries with about 2.3 billion people, which is about one third of the world population. The results of this work show that laundry washing in private households is done with quite different amounts of electricity and water in different parts of the world both in absolute and relative comparison to the overall household consumption. But due to different consumer habits in dealing with the achieved washing performance in the different global regions, the best practice in washing laundry in a most sustainable way cannot be determined yet. Further research is needed to form a basis for a most sustainable development of resource consumption in private households.

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The great progress in the energy efficiency of household appliances is primarily generated by the improved design of refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and dishwashers. In the long term, a positive effect on household electricity consumption is expected with increasing numbers of old appliances being replaced by new and more energy‐efficient ones. Studies of electricity consumption in private households show that energy efficiency can also be improved by changes in consumer behaviour, in addition to improvements in the technical design of appliances. Consumer studies on behavioural aspects of electricity consumption related to large household appliances have already been conducted, but little information is available about cooking. However, the influence of consumer behaviour on energy consumption is particularly interesting where cooking is concerned. The most important processes of manual and machine food preparation shall therefore be investigated regarding performance and energy efficiency. This provides a basis for attempting to estimate the energy‐saving potential of optimized cooking processes in order to obtain sound scientific information about the energy‐saving potentials for the most typical and relevant cooking processes in European households, which are: boiling water (representing hot drinks, soups and parboiling process); brewing coffee (representing automated brewing processes); cooking potatoes (representing the cooking process itself); boiling eggs (representing automated boiling processes). The study shows that the energy consumption of typical household cooking processes varies greatly according to the chosen method. In the tests carried out for this study, the method making most sense in terms of energy consumption saved between 50% and 70% energy compared with the least favourable method. Based on the results, the authors provide recommendations on energy‐saving cooking methods.

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