White Goods as a Service for public landlords

Important results from the project

In Stage 1, the project aimed to investigate the conditions for a system where manufacturers provide appliances as a service to municipal housing companies and to investigate whether it would be economically, environmentally and socially sustainable. The work focused on: - identifying the opportunities and obstacles that a rental system would entail based on the current conditions. - describe how the system could be designed, tested and developed in Stage 2 based on these possibilities and how the obstacles could then be eliminated.

Expected long term effects

The environmental analysis showed that the intended system is desirable from a resource and climate perspective. The study showed that there is limited practical knowledge regarding both offering or purchasing consumer products as a service within the public utility housing companies. Half of the 23 largest housing companies were positive or neutral to take part in a basic offer of white goods as a service. The project group´s understanding of how today´s management of white goods looks has been refined, thereby also the ideas of how a solution could be designed and tested in Stage 2.

Approach and implementation

The project began with an inventory of the state of knowledge about similar systems via literature studies and searches on the internet. Then, critical success factors, benefits and barriers were identified. Based on the model, the factors, advantages and obstacles identified through literature studies, interviews and surveys in collaboration with students at Hyper Island and Linköping University are examined so that the reasonableness of a practical test of a real system could be assessed.