In , Table 1 shows energy requirements for Materials, Production, Use, Disposal of a washing machine normalized to a single wash load. The results are summarized here:

Here the negative value for Disposal represents recovered energy from material recycling and waste-water treatment.

The article also describes the ill-effects of miscounting resources when combining life-cycle analyses (LCAs) for multiple products with incongruous boundaries . They call this the "washing machine effect".