A lot of working appliances get scrapped — and it’s money out the door

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency puts a number on a habit most of us never question. In a single year it counted about 5.3 million tons of major appliances entering the waste stream; while most of the metal is recovered as scrap, roughly 2.1 million tons of appliance material were landfilled rather than recycled or reused.

Some of those machines were genuinely dead. But plenty weren’t — working units, or ones a modest repair would have saved, replaced because replacing felt easier than diagnosing. Each one is a double loss: the material buried, and the owner’s money spent on a new machine they didn’t strictly need.

That’s the waste OwnWise is built to prevent. Before you write off an appliance, it identifies the likely fault and a fair price to fix it, and flags any warranty or recall that should cover the repair — so “replace it” becomes a deliberate choice, not a default. The cheapest and greenest appliance is usually the one you already own, kept running.