066 FOCUS
Virtuous circle
Lighting designer and sustainability expert Bob Bohannon looks at the urgent need to apply the circular economy to lighting and why sectors such as retail should be among the first to adopt it
AS A BOY in the 1970s I remember walking into my (then) local high street in Sevenoaks by night. On the way the roads were somewhat dimly lit and when you got there only the occasional shop window was illuminated. T e sum total of the exterior lighting scheme for Bligh’s Hotel was a solitary lantern hanging over the main door. In those days perhaps not the most energy effi cient of technology, but there wasn’t that much used and what there was lasted a long time. T e stores themselves and their fi t-outs seemed as permanent and unchanging as the seven oak trees on the north side of the cricket ground. Jump forward 30 years and energy effi ciency had improved, but cleaning, repairing and relamping, keeping things in use – all forms of life extension – were still a normal part of lighting management. Move forward another 15 years to around 2015 and we were at the beginning of the LED revolution.
LEDs gave us energy effi ciency, a useful reduction of heat and, when of decent quality, long lives with vastly reduced maintenance. Compared with my dimly lit high street of the 1970s we saw an explosion of hospitality and retail development, all with many, many more luminaires than before – albeit much more energy effi cient ones. T e rate of churn in those stores and hospitality venues, or the frequency of fi t-outs, made some of them seem as impermanent as those same seven trees when faced with the Great Gale of 1987.
Right The retail sector, with its well-established and widespread use of track and spot, ‘should be the early adopter for practical reasons as well as its high churn rate of equipment’
, they are part of the drive to net zero and they are part of the green jobs revolution that drives economic
And here’s the rub: the old joke about how many (fi ll in your stereotype) does it take to change a light bulb doesn’t work any more. T e LED board and the driver is often integral to the fi tting, so if one were to fail you have to replace the whole thing – you simply can’t repair it or extend its life, even if you wanted to. Lease provisions typically give the landlord the option to enforce restoring a unit to its pre-let condition. T e result: thousands of light fi ttings thrown into the skip every year. We’ve all become used to this throwaway economy, only pausing to grumble that our washing machine or TV doesn’t last as long any more, while we order the (cheapest) shiny new one. By now you are probably thinking that this Bob Bohannon bloke is a bit of a Luddite, stuck in a pre-LED world where everything looked better through (2,900K tungsten halogen) tinted spectacles. Compared with tungsten halogen and fl uorescent, LEDs are more energy effi cient, they have been responsible for huge savings in emitted CO2
growth. LEDs have allowed designers to be more creative with light, especially when integrated into fi t-out displays. Low individual wattages, miniaturisation and LED tape allow many more lighting points – often to good eff ect. But this is not the whole story: we might have a problem. Now many would think, not unreasonably, that we recycled all those replaced fl uorescent fi ttings, tungsten halogen spots and fi rst-generation LEDs that didn’t last quite as long as hoped because the manufacturers were still on the learning curve, or generation-two LEDs where cost savings compromised reliability – but I present you with an inconvenient truth: ‘In 2019, 42,000t of lighting equipment were placed on the UK market,’ said Nigel Harvey, chief executive of the UK’s leading WEEE-compliance specialist Recolight. ‘Only 2,700 were recovered through WEEE schemes. T e amount offi cially recorded as reused was zero,’ he continued.
So what happened to all these luminaires, not forgetting that the WEEE directive came into force in 2003 so any equipment 18 years old or younger all proudly bore the crossed-out wheelie bin mark? T e inconvenient truth is that the vast majority were sent to landfi ll. According to Recolight, less than 7% were sent to a grandly named Approved Authorised Waste Treatment Centre. Of those
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