Volume 559, 15 July 2016, Pages 192–203 •Over 200 M domestic vacuum cleaners in the EU consume 18.5 TWh electricity annually.•First comprehensive LCA of vacuum cleaners to estimate the effects of EU regulation•The eco-design regulation will reduce the EU impacts by 37%–44% by 2020.•The WEEE directive will have a moderate effect, reducing the impact by < 1%.•Decarbonisation of electricity would decrease most the impacts by 6%–20% by 2020.Energy efficiency of vacuum cleaners has been declining over the past decades while at the same time their number in Europe has been increasing. The European Commission has recently adopted an eco-design regulation to improve the environmental performance of vacuum cleaners. In addition to the existing directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), the regulation could potentially have significant effects on the environmental performance of vacuum cleaners. However, the scale of the effects is currently unknown, beyond scant information on greenhouse gas emissions.

Thus, this paper considers for the first time life cycle environmental impacts of vacuum cleaners and the effects of the implementation of these regulations at the European level. The effects of electricity decarbonisation, product lifetime and end-of-life disposal options are also considered. The results suggest that the implementation of the eco-design regulation alone will reduce significantly the impacts from vacuum cleaners (37%–44%) by 2020 compared with current situation. If business as usual continued and the regulation was not implemented, the impacts would be 82%–109% higher by 2020 compared to the impacts with the implementation of the regulation. Improvements associated with the implementation of the WEEE directive will be much smaller (< 1% in 2020). However, if the WEEE directive did not exist, then the impacts would be 2%–21% higher by 2020 relative to the impacts with the implementation of the directive. Further improvements in most impacts (6%–20%) could be achieved by decarbonising the electricity mix.

Therefore, energy efficiency measures must be accompanied by appropriate actions to reduce the environmental impacts of electricity generation; otherwise, the benefits of improved energy efficiency could be limited. vacuum cleaner robot carpetMoreover, because of expected lower life expectancy of vacuum cleaners and limited availability of some raw materials, the eco-design regulation should be broadened to reduce the impacts from raw materials, production and end-of-life management.bagless vacuum cleaner offersSeveral studies have assessed life cycle environmental impacts of different electrical appliances and electronic products (Andrae and Andersen, 2010 and Song and Li, 2015). kirby vacuum cleaner and shampooer

The former include refrigerators (Monfared et al., 2014), dishwashers (Johansson and Björklund, 2010), ovens (Mudgal et al., 2011) and washing machines (Ardente and Mathieux, 2014). The impacts of electronic products studied in the literature include plasma TVs (Feng and Ma, 2009 and Hischier and Baudin, 2010), computers (Choi et al., 2006, Duan et al., 2009 and Teehan and Kandlikar, 2012) and monitors (Zhou and Schoenung, 2007), mobile phones (Andrae and Vaija, 2014) and e-books (Jeswani and Azapagic, 2015). However, the analysis of the life cycle environmental performance of vacuum cleaners has received little attention in literature with few studies available. For example, Lenau and Bey (2001) and Hur et al. (2005) proposed and tested different simplified life cycle assessment (LCA) methodologies using semi-quantitative inventory data of unspecified models of vacuum cleaners as examples. In both studies, the main objective was to compare the proposed methodologies and, therefore, these studies did not provide specific conclusions related to the environmental performance of these devices.

A screening LCA on vacuum cleaners (AEA, 2009) was also performed as part of preparatory documents for the development of the European Union (EU) eco-design regulation for vacuum cleaners (European Commission, 2013a). The main objective of this study was to assess the environmental performance of different types of vacuum cleaner and to identify improvement opportunities. The study was performed with aggregated inventory data provided by manufacturers and specific data obtained by disassembly of certain elements (AEA, 2009). Only three environmental impacts were considered (global warming, eutrophication and acidification), in addition to some air emissions and heavy metals which were estimated at the inventory level only. The findings indicated that use of vacuum cleaners was the main hotspot and identified various alternatives to improve their energy efficiency and cleaning performance. However, as far as we are aware, a comprehensive LCA study of vacuum cleaners has not been carried out yet so that it is not known how the use stage affects other impacts and how much the other life cycle stages, such as raw materials and waste management, contribute to these.

This is particularly pertinent in light of the European strategy on circular economy which promotes resource efficiency and waste minimisation (European Commission, 2014).The power rating of vacuum cleaners has increased markedly since the 1960s, from 500 W to over 2500 W, persuading consumers that a “powerful” cleaner will perform better (AEA, 2009, Biček et al., 2014 and Dyson, 2011). However, higher power does not necessarily lead to a better cleaning performance but does mean a lower energy efficiency, which dropped from 30–35% in the 1970s to below 25% in recent years without noticeable improvements in the cleaning performance (AEA, 2009).More than 200 million of domestic vacuum cleaners are currently in use in the European Union (EU), with around 45 million sold annually and a market growth of 9% per year (European Commission, 2013b). The average annual electricity consumption by these devices in the EU was estimated at 18.5 TWh in 2010 (European Commission, 2013b), representing 0.6% of the total EU consumption (ENTSO-E, 2011) and equivalent to the annual electricity generation by five gas power plants (DECC, 2015).