The paper describes solutions that might have a huge environmental impact on the management of defective products and waste. It presents briefly the concepts of sustainable development, ecological design, closing material loops and the treatment options used to recover the value from defective products and waste, turning them into secondary raw materials. The Polish household appliances (HA) industry case is presented, as it is one of the biggest industries in Poland as well as dynamically developing. The research points out the options to manage HA defective products and waste, highlights the practices at this field of HA manufacturing enterprises, and creates the directions to be followed by the companies to become more environmentally focused, especially by designing their products with regard to ecological issues, following product life cycles, recovering the value from them, reusing materials in closed loops and finally by these elements generating less defective products and waste to not harm the natural environment.