Products

Our Approach

Our Design for Environment (DfE) program serves the products piece of our sustainability approach. Designing and building high-performance goods and services that take less from the Earth requires a deep understanding of the materials and components that make up our products. Transparency has been, and continues to be, a key pillar of the DfE strategy.

Product design teams are guided by our Product Attribute Leadership Scorecard (PALS), which incorporates resource-efficiency attributes into the planning and product design phase. Additionally, the global Critical Materials Management (CMM) team coordinates and monitors our Restricted Material List. Suppliers are required to adhere to our Restricted Material List and report on banned, restricted and monitored substances of concern. The list is updated annually to reflect new legislation and customer requirements and woven into all supplier contracts and approval processes.

Packaging also plays a vital role in delivering quality products to consumers’ homes, but it can quickly become “waste” immediately upon delivery.

We are working to change this through comprehensive design, education, supply chain solutions, and thoughtful material selection.

highlights

We will continue to raise the bar on disclosure requirements by requesting Full Material Disclosure (FMD) from our global suppliers in 2020.

In EMEA, we made an industry-leading voluntary pledge toward employing over 44,500 tonnes of recycled plastics into our products by 2025.

We are on track to phase out halogenated flame retardants and PVC in all plastic parts and in our products’ control boards by 2030.

Finally, increasing the connectivity of our products to make them smarter allows consumers to control and monitor performance in ways that are more environmentally responsible. Features like adaptable use allow consumers to choose different modes and settings when operating the appliance—reducing overall energy, water, and detergent demand while increasing performance.

Conflict minerals

Whirlpool Corporation is committed to complying with federal laws and regulations requiring disclosure of the use of conflict minerals. We developed a conflict mineral due diligence framework that conforms to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) guidelines. Our efforts have continued to improve overall supply chain transparency and create further awareness within to ur organization that will allow us to further improve due diligence and mitigate risk in the future. Please see the Whirlpool Corporation Conflict Minerals Policy for more.

In 2019
1,100+
suppliers were trained on the CMM portal and our Restricted Materials List

Highlights

New Targets to Reduce GHG Emissions in our Products

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Technology & Innovation inclusive of Design for Environment

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New Product Stewardship Tool Enables Transparency

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How2Recycle Labels Continue to Roll Out

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SmartWay for Energy Efficient Shipping

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Product Life Cycle and
End of Life

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ReNEWW: Innovation Designed for the Environment

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Other Product Highlights

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New Targets to Reduce GHG
Emissions in our Products

Our commitments to reduce our emissions through the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) extend to the emissions from products in use. In 2019, we set a new target to reduce GHG emissions from products in use 20% by 2030 from a 2016 baseline. This Scope 3 target was developed with the support of an Environmental Defense Fund Climate Corps Fellow. Our global emissions management system for Scope 3 emissions improves our ability to act strategically to lower the footprint of our product portfolio.

Technology & Innovation inclusive
of Design for Environment

Resource efficiency attributes, including energy and water consumption, have been on our PALS for many years. The PALS is used by our marketing and engineering teams to inform the early stages of product design. In 2019, we added materials to the scorecard to encourage product design teams to include post-consumer recycled content, packaging, and material alternatives in our products as often as possible to further reduce our environmental impact.

New Product Stewardship Tool
Enables Transparency

In 2019, we deployed a new online product stewardship tool throughout the EMEA region to track, map, and store chemical composition data throughout our complex supply chain.

The stewardship tool generated more than 39,000 materials compliance requests to more than 900 suppliers around the world, which included the opportunity to engage with the Full Material Disclosure survey. As the database grows, it will enable us to make bolder design decisions, serving as the foundation for our dematerialization efforts, alternative material sourcing plan, and chemical and material phase-out strategies. We look forward to deploying the tool globally in 2020.

How2Recycle Labels Continue to Roll Out

Whirlpool Corporation is a proud supporting member of How2Recycle, a labeling system designed to provide easy-to-understand recycling instructions to consumers in North America. Already, a number of our affresh products are using the How2Recycle label, and we look forward to extending our portfolio of How2Recycle labels on our direct-to-consumer products in the North America region throughout 2020.

SmartWay for Energy Efficient Shipping

We consider sustainability, not only in the design and development of our products, but also in how we deliver products to our customers and retailers. We ship nearly all (97%) of our products in North America using SmartWay® carriers. As part of the U.S. EPA SmartWay program, certified SmartWay drivers commit to increasing their energy efficiency and fuel economy. We won the EPA SmartWay Excellence Award for our freight supply chain energy and environmental performance for the fifth consecutive year in 2019.

“Our efforts to optimize the environmental performance of our supply chain play an important role in reducing our carbon footprint.”

Jim Keppler, Vice President,
Integrated Supply Chain, and Quality

Product Life Cycle
and End of Life

We look at products from a complete life-cycle perspective, including design, production, use in home, and collection and recycling. We design our new products by considering specific attributes to improve resource efficiency, which includes energy and water efficiency (impacting the use phase of our products) and materials efficiency (impacting the design and end-of-life phases of our products). Overall, we want to provide consumers with products that are designed using materials with the lowest environmental impact possible, that are efficient in their electricity and water consumption, and that can be easily recycled at the end of life.

Research published in 2019 by the U.S. Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) found that about 90% of all major appliances in the U.S. and Canada are recycled. Additionally, research from APPLiA (Home Appliance Europe) shows that approximately 90% of end-of-life material collected is recovered/recycled across the EU and that the industry reduced both water and energy consumption per product. Across the world, Whirlpool Corporation, along with our retail partners, participates in over 45 appliance take-back programs in different states, provinces, and countries, where a majority of our products are recycled or reused at the end of life.

An EPA-funded study is using the ReNEWW House as its first test case to better understand on-site water usage data and water quality metrics to assess the impact of its water-efficient and low-flow homes on water quality and health. The results of this study, which is being conducted by Purdue University with support from other universities, will be published in 2020.

ReNEWW: Innovation Designed for the Environment

On the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, Whirlpool Corporation’s ReNEWW (Retrofitted Net-zero Energy, Water and Waste) House continues to accelerate our talent and innovation pipeline, driving ecosystem development across our products and the home. The house represents the aspirational vision for the project: to convert a home, originally built in 1928, to offset all its energy use with solar power, relying on locally available water sources and have waste-handling systems that prevent any household waste from going to the landfill. Our work with the ReNEWW House is providing valuable insights for our homebuilder collaborators and customers on technologies that enable sustainable living. We leverage the world-class facilities and collaborate with Purdue researchers to accelerate the development of the next generation of ultra-high-efficiency appliances that increase core performance while lowering their impact on the environment and cost to operate.

In 2019, the ReNEWW House continued studying innovative techniques for tracking and disposing of traditional waste, including developing a smart bin that gives immediate feedback to consumers on the quantities and types of trash that they are producing. ReNEWW is also studying how to use waste energy, with research ongoing into how to reuse waste heat that is generated throughout the home. Our engineers also continued making improvements to the design and control systems of ReNEWW’s Biowall, installed in 2017 using plants and phytoremediation to filter the indoor air supply of the ReNEWW House.

A graduate thesis study was completed in 2019 at the ReNEWW House related to the production and dispersion of nano aerosols in Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB). An important step toward improving indoor air quality in NZEBs is understanding how occupants, their activities, and building systems affect the emissions of nanoaerosol.

Another continuing initiative at Purdue is the DC House, which was set up to conduct research into energy-efficiency best practices. Whirlpool Corporation engineers and Purdue Engineering researchers continue to work on better understanding how to convert all in-home electrical power from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC), thus increasing in-home energy efficiency. Traditional homes operate on AC circuitry, but are comprised of devices, appliances, and electronics that require a conversion to DC power. Each of these conversions incurs a loss, which restricts energy availability and efficiency, and leads to higher costs. Alternative energy sources, on the other hand, naturally produce DC power, and thus suffer multiple conversion losses in order to be used within an AC system.

Other product highlights

Perfect for tight spaces or for families looking to remove an extra step in their laundry process, the Whirlpool Smart All-In-One Washer & Dryer completes a load of laundry in the same machine. Additionally, using one machine for two processes reduces consumption of resources.

Whirlpool dishwashers include intelligent 6TH SENSE Technology that intuitively detects the soil level on dishes and optimizes cleaning resources accordingly. This range of dishwashers uses only 9.5 liters of water per cycle and falls in the A+++ class for energy efficiency. Dishwashers save water and energy and have lower emissions compared to handwashing according to a recent study. As some consumers in India move from handwashing to dishwashers, the environmental impact from the dishwashing process has the potential to decrease.

Our Consul Inverter air conditioner in Brazil achieves energy savings of up to 35% compared to other air conditioners in its class.