Louis is right. The term is offensive.
It is also offensive to people who actually give a damn if the planet is still inhabitable in 100 years - comparing us to Nazis is childish and ignorant.
Plastic isn't the enemy and light weight isn't the enemy. Here is what I think is going on... People who have no experience of materials engineering seek a simple way to distinguish quality from junk. They bang a side panel and if it seems tinny they assume the whole machine is junk. They look at a tub and if it is plastic, they assume is is cheaply made. Weight becomes a fools guide to quality.
Here in Australia and New Zealand, we have fairly high wages by world standards, and good working conditions. Labour is a high proportion of manufacturing costs. In the 1980s when Japanese washing machines were becoming popular, the local companies had to cut costs to keep selling machines. They basically produced an Aussie machine that was similar to the Japanese machines, saving weight where they could, cutting costs where they could, but still with a view to quality - materials engineers and metallurgists working out which metal or which grade of plastic would still be reliable for each component. This "new" generation of machines was very successful, buyers and repairers were skeptical but the machines have proven themselves over decades. They certainly wash better, spin faster and last longer than the heavily built machines they replaced. These models, with incremental changes over time, are more or less still in production, though unfortunately the Australian companies were bought out by international giants who moved production to Thailand to further cut costs, and closed the Aussie factories.
Fisher and Paykel did a similar thing in New Zealand, replacing a heavily built UK design made under license with their own "clean sheet of paper design" which was very light weight, with tinny sides and light weight plastic top and lid, plastic outer tub, but superbly engineered. I still own a Fisher and Paykel top loader from about 1990 which has had only two repairs in all that time - a rubber drain hose and a water fill valve. These components are the exact same as those used on big heavy top loaders. It is not a museum piece - it is still used most days, it was used by my parents until they went to aged care, then it went to wash for friends of mine. It is proof that the right grade of plastic or nylon, and the appropriate use of light weight sheet steel, is every bit as durable as old fashioned washing machines that weigh more than twice as much. All those extra unnecessary grams/ounces have to be paid for, they force prices up. Plastic doesn't rust, too. Fisher and Paykel used to advertise the mechanical simplicity of their Smart Drive machines with the line "if a component isn't there, it can't fail." (No belts, no transmission, etc.) I would add "and it doesn't have to be paid for, either."
I once bought a new box trailer to tow behind my car. It was heavily built and looked solid, but all mild steel, it rusted out in 4 years as it was poor quality steel and poorly painted. When I was replacing it, it was so badly rusted it was falling to pieces on its last trip to be traded in on a new one. I had to stop at a hardware store and buy some screws to hold it together for its final journey. I replaced it with a lightweight galvanized sheetmetal trailer, an Erde trailer from France, which has now had well over 20 years of hard use and is still exactly as good as new, no deterioration at all. It probably weighs half the old trailer, which makes it light and easy to tow, too. It is a prime example that clever design and appropriate choice of materials is better than dinosaur engineering.
Unfortunately many modern machines are genuinely cheap rubbish, lightly built from inappropriate materials, cheapened up in companies where bean counters rule over engineers, or made in cheap-labour countries by manufacturers that copied a quality product without understanding the engineering behind each component, so it looks the same but works really poorly and fails quickly. But that is a product of poor engineering, not light weight and using plastics.
