Time to Take Sustainability Seriously

How do we balance a commitment to creativity with goals for circularity asks Paul Nulty, founder of global lighting design practice Nulty.

The role of an independent lighting designer has aways been to pull the creative and technical threads of a project together to elevate an experience, improve efficiency and wellbeing, and fill spaces with emotion and character.

Over the last decade, this balancing act got a whole lot harder as we found ourselves grappling with another thread – environmental impact. In our endeavour to design in a more conscious way, we realised that there’s more than one strand to the sustainability thread and some complicated knots to unravel along the way.

Whilst the lighting community has made great progress in recent years to reduce energy consumption and make sustainability intrinsic to the way that we design, the focus has shifted, and the circular economy is now our goal.

Moving to circularity is one of the toughest tests that we’ve faced as an industry and feels like an almighty knot to unpick. It requires us to consider the whole life cycle of design – from the carbon footprint of the design process itself, through to what happens when a scheme comes to the end of its life – and somehow loop all these elements back to create a circular economy.

Thankfully, we found a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel with the arrival of the TM66 Technical Memorandum from CIBSE and Society of Light and Lighting.

Pre-TM66, lighting designers struggled to categorise luminaires in the context of the circular economy as this meant either wading through reams of data about materials, manufacturing, and supply chains to build an accurate picture, or accepting that information wasn’t available or forthcoming.

In the post-TM66 world, easy-to-use checklists and easyto-understand ratings turn a highly complex subject into a clear and transparent methodology. It’s been a great leveller for the industry, providing us with a standardised assessment tool and a springboard to greater clarity and responsibility.

‘We have embedded TM66 into our design process and set ourselves the target of achieving a 2 and above score for 50 per cent of specified luminaires over a period of six months’

In the short space of time that our team has been using TM66, we have felt incredibly motivated as a practice to be more accountable for the luminaires that we specify.

Earlier on in the year, we embedded TM66 into our design process and set ourselves the target of achieving a 2 and above score for 50 per cent of specified luminaires over a period of six months.

We were frustrated at being part of the conversation but not seeing any real momentum for change, so this is our small but significant commitment to making circularity a non-negotiable attribute on our specifications.

We also feel strongly that a data-driven analysis approach can help us educate stakeholders outside of the lighting design industry, and challenge value engineering to ensure that the aspiration for circularity at the front end of a project is matched with an appetite for longevity at the end.

Whilst attempting to reconcile a commitment to creativity with metrics for circularity feels right for us as a global design practice operating across multiple sectors, we’re not advocating that everyone must take the same approach. The industry is far-reaching and diverse. Smaller practices may find it difficult to influence decision makers.

Residential designers will find it much harder to make an impact than designers operating in the commercial workplace or retail sectors where strong pledges are being made to meet circular economy objectives.

Ultimately, it’s about personal accountability and every person finding their own way to strive for better. As long as we keep pushing each other to change the mindset that steady improvements are enough, we’ll move closer to making the circular economy a tangible reality.