Lighting
What Facilities Managers Should Consider When Assessing Sustainable Lighting
There’s far more to sustainable lighting than energy efficiency and power consumption. Embodied carbon, product lifespan, repairability and circularity all play a part in sustainable lighting as Nick Gwilliam, Lighting Designer at Ansell Lighting, explains.
It’s fair to say that when assessing sustainable lighting options many facilities managers look at energy efficiency ratings, LED performance and little else.
Whilst energy efficiency plays a huge role in the sustainability cycle, there’s much more to consider and facilities managers, faced with ambitious net zero targets to meet, should take a broader view of what sustainability really means when assessing lighting system suitability.
The design, materials used, manufacturing processes, maintenance requirements and ultimately how products can be disposed of at the end of their useful life all impact sustainability credentials, with the focus being on keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible, reducing waste and minimising the need for new resources.
One of the first factors facilities managers should consider when assessing the sustainability of lighting systems is embodied carbon. Unlike operational carbon, which is generated during use, embodied carbon refers to the emissions generated from raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, installation and end of life processing. It looks at the wider environmental impact of a product throughout its lifecycle and plays a significant part in the sustainability cycle and assessing the environmental impact of lighting products.
Look for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) and other sustainability credentials which will provide this information and other valuable insight into the suitability of products, enabling more informed specification decisions.
22 fmuk
The next factor is repairability. True sustainability means moving away from a ‘replace and dispose’ mindset to one of ‘repair and maintain’, opting for lighting solutions with replaceable components that can be used to fix and upgrade products as required. Until recently, when fittings such as downlights stopped working, it would be necessary to replace the entire product, but a focus on sustainable design means that manufacturers have now started to introduce modular products with replaceable parts such as drivers and light engines. This means that individual components can be replaced in the event of a part failure, reducing unnecessary whole-product replacement and the use of added resources in the supply chain.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
