Modelling resource consumption for laundry and dish treatment in individual households for various consumer segments

Recent research allocates up to 80% of environmental impact in energy and CO2 terms to direct and indirect consumer activities. Various models discussed how this impact can be assigned to specific lifestyles, production and consumption systems, and psychological motives in order to be able to predict and influence these effects. In this work, another approach is followed by showing on the example of laundry and dish washing how well-known factors of the technical status, consumer practices and demographic data allow building up a model to predict the energy and water consumption for these processes. The results show a variation of a factor of 5 between a more sustainable and a more careless behaviour and allow thus to identify levers to influence it. As results can also be easily transformed into monetary values, this may allow influencing the consumer via this channel as he/she can easily understand what may need to be changed.