Sustainable Design

At Electrolux, we define ourselves as Thoughtful Design Innovators. We innovate with insight; making appliances easier to use and fostering ease of mind. We want people to know that our “Thinking of you” mantra doesn’t stop at their front doors. But we’re thinking of the world around them too.

Our approach to design reflects a product’s life cycle. We address the impacts of manufacturing, product use, recycling and reuse of material. With particular focus on the use-phase, because close to 80% of a product’s environmental impact occurs during this period.

The Climate Challenge

Climate change is the defining issue of our age. And in order to tackle it, a twinned approach of energy efficiency and a focus on function is clearly our only option.

Take the Electrolux UltraSilencer Green vacuum cleaner. We reduced the wattage from 2,000w to 1,250w without sacrificing performance. Sound materials? Check – it’s constructed from post-consumer recycled plastic. Easy recyclability? Another check – that PP plastic on the UltraSilencer Green, perhaps once a car bumper, can be made into more plastic at the end of its useful life – 93% of the vacuum can be recycled. In short, the UltraSilencer Green allows a household to save 320 kilos of CO2 emissions over its 10-year life span.

Our foremost challenge in a world where population and economies are growing exponentially is to continually reduce the impacts of our products, while guiding the consumer on how to make further sustainability choices.

While some fridges are purely designed to hold large volumes of food, the Electrolux FreshFrostFreeTM range encourage consumers to preserve food longer, rather than waste it. With an estimated 20% of global greenhouse gases linked to the food chain, this represents a significant opportunity for change. Our goal with FreshFrostFreeTM is to demonstrate in its very design, with its movable glass bins, and humidity control to help food retain flavors longer, that reducing food waste is not difficult.

Thinking Outside the Box

Every year, Electrolux Design Lab invites industrial design students to present innovative ideas for appliances of the future.
Finalists have included a portable solar cooker charged by its spray-on solar cells, a clothes washer where natural soap nuts replace detergents and a cooker that creates the night’s salmon dinner from a packet of muscle cells, oxygen, and nutrients. For Electrolux, the competition is a springboard to think beyond current solutions and address the challenges we all face tomorrow.

In the short term, future generations of appliances will appear more intuitive, more energy-efficient and material-homogenous. Beyond individual appliances, we are thinking of the sustainable home, which is an integrated network where the waste from one product rejuvenates the function of another. In mega-cities where space is tight, we see how individual needs can be served by shared appliances — resource savers that consume a fraction of the energy of today’s solutions.

That's where we want to go. We see sustainable design's future as a culmination of what consumers see on the surface of a product, and how the product enables them to make a change for the better.