A couple of points:
1) It's illegal to dispose of domestic appliances into landfill in Ireland, and has been for quite some time. If you buy a new appliance, the retailer's required to collect an equivalent for recycling, and a small fee is charged on the cost of any item purchased to cover handing.
2) Your Green Bin (recycling bin) most certainly does not go into the same waste stream as your Grey/Black Bin (General Waste). Also, in Ireland you are charged per KG or per bin collected for all non-recyclables, so there's a significant financial disincentive not to recycle. Many areas have also rolled out central composting where compostable waste is collected in a brown bin.
3) The environment is not "F*****D no matter what we do... ". The choices that we make every day, do have an impact on it and you can make minor changes to how you do things, such as buying a non-disposable washing machine, which do not impact negatively on your lifestyle, yet have seriously positive impacts on the environment.
Manufacturing a domestic appliance takes very serious amounts of energy and natural resources. Also, if the machine's made in China, it may not necessarily have been made in a way that would comply with European or North American environmental regulations i.e. the plant that milled the steel, the plant that made the machine etc is quite likely to have spewed all sorts of nasties into the environment.
Cheap, throw-away appliances, i.e. washing machines that only last 15 months, are having a massive impact on the environment.
I am really getting a bit fed-up with the attitude that a large domestic appliance should be simply chucked-out after a couple of years of operation.
Older machines and more expensive modern brands are designed to be repaired and maintained to get at least 10 to 15 years of service out of them.
Back even in the 1980s, a washing machine was something that was built to last a reasonable length of time.
If your household does produce that volume of washing you really need to look at how you are processing it.
1) See if you can reduce the volume of washing being produced.
2) Get a bigger washing machine
3) Get a sturdier washing machine.
Hotpoint / Hotpoint-Ariston really doesn't produce machines that are designed to cope with that kind of loading.
If you do insist on getting a hotpoint, you'd need to be looking at something pretty large, like an Extendia or an Aqualitis.
Realistically though, given the frequency of those washes you need a machine that can cope with light-commercial loadings and that's pretty much exclusively Miele.
Some of the high end Whirlpools also claim to be able to cope, but you really can't go far wrong with Miele.
