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END OF LIGHT ISSUE
The circular economy takes a wider view. Just because one person has finished with a product does not mean
What is the circular economy and why is it important? John Bullock explains
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Twitter: @sll100 5 he typical way that we think about the things we use assumes that we keep something for as long it's helpful to us, after which we throw it away. How it gets thrown away rarely enters the consciousness of the user/disposer. What that has meant across the generations is that we have continued to extract materials from the planet rather than consider what happens when those materials run out.
As products age, some components wear out and need to be replaced, and if there’s one aspect of the circular economy that has already had an influence on product design it’s the idea that goods should be repairable. As long as the product in its entirety can continue to be of service, it will have a useful life. It's what happens at the very end of active life where the true circular economy can be seen.
The climate crisis has brought materials exploitation into sharp relief. The growth of the recycling industry as an answer to repurposing spent materials was that there is no value left in it. When we’ve ‘finished with’ a motor car, we understand that there could be a lot of residual worth left in it and, rather than scrap it, we sell it on at a lower cost. That is the beginning of the circular economy process... though nowhere near the end of it.
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a great step forward – provided no one looked at the energy that was required in that repurposing. For example, aluminium is one of the most reused metals on the planet. It's reckoned that 75 per cent of the aluminium that has ever been processed is still in use. Unfortunately, there is an energy cost that comes with that. When an exhausted aluminium component goes for recycling it involves smelting the metal to create a stock billet that can be sold and reused – and that takes energy. When the aluminium billet is then smelted (again) to create another component, that takes yet more energy. ‘Should
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But what if the original component still contained residual value? Isn’t there a way that the component can find its way back into the production stream directly?
That new attitude to used components is at the heart of the circular economy.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT IN THE LIGHTING INDUSTRY? Historically, we have always had a version of the circular economy within the lighting industry. The replaceable parts were the light source (let’s call it a ‘lamp’) along with any associated electronic circuitry. The luminaire body lasted for as long as it was needed – and that could be any number of iterations as the lamps were changed many times during its active life. It's why many of us have lighting fixtures in our homes that may be decades old.
The LED changed that view. It didn’t help that a lot of the new companies that entered the marketplace in the early years of the 21st century had little or no awareness of the fixture+lamp tradition. So it was that we have seen a generation of LED luminaires where the LED engine (let’s call it an engine for convenience, though it may just be a chip array or a PCB) was cemented into the luminaire body, which then doubled as the heatsink. And, because this is only an end-of-life issue, not many people worried about what would happen further down the track when the LED started to fail.
We are now further down the track and things need to change.
But it's not a straightforward journey. There are questions about how deep a circular economy approach needs to go. Is this really just about being able to change exhausted components (LED engines and drivers) and not worry about the luminaire housing, or should we take a more principled approach which says that the entire luminaire should be capable of disassembly and that every component should become available for reuse?
The European Commission (remember them?) is currently exploring ways of supporting the reuse of components and is looking to develop a set of standards that will define the principles, concepts and terminology that we can all use to ‘normalise’ circular economy processes.
In truth, there is no shortcut to this process. Trying to convince us that a luminaire body doesn’t need to be a part of the circular economy is another way of kicking the issue down the road – again. Most material use goes into the luminaire housing (by weight/mass). It’s in the housing where the core of the problem lies, so we can’t ignore it. Athough it’s not the only issue.
A currently unresolved problem is potentially more crucial to our future – or, at least, to the future of the LED. Whereas a luminaire housing is made up chiefly of aluminium and/or steel (though the industry is seeing more use of plastics, which is not a good idea), the LED engine and the driver are full of tiny amounts of rare earths and precious metals. There is currently no commercial (aka profitable) way – and in some instances no technical way – to recover those minerals and you might say that the most valuable part of the LED luminaire still ends up in landfill. That is crazy, but it's where we are at the moment, and the situation can only become more problematic. At the moment we’re not seeing a lot of LED luminaires at their end of life – but watch this space.
HOW THE INDUSTRY MIGHT RESPOND Happily, we’re already seeing some great responses by manufacturers. New ranges were expected to be launched at Light+Building in Frankfurt this year (now let’s see what September brings) that demonstrate how the circular economy can be applied to commercial product. Other companies have realised that they’ve been working on circular economy principles for years and have found, at last, a reason to shout about it. As I say, this is by no means a new approach to product design – it's more a case of refocusing on good design practice.
What’s not yet been resolved is how the circular economy operates in practice. It's one thing making a luminaire that can be disassembled, it's another thing to create an economic model where such dis- and reassembly can work. Most manufacturers are taking the approach that they will be the ones who retain control of their products, possibly via an upturn in the acceptability by clients of Light as a Service (LaaS). This is a reasonable attitude to take if we think in terms of large-scale projects where thousands of products are installed in a building, but it’s not the real picture.
I have nothing to support these percentages, but let’s just assume that the total output of a lighting company might split 80:20 between lots of smallscale projects (80 per cent) and a small number of large-scale projects (20 per cent). If the manufacturer is only paying attention to the headline projects, then 80 per cent of its output risk is being ignored – and that is hardly a circular economy model.
Using motor car servicing as a model we can see another way. Small, privately owned garages are licensed to work on particular motor brands, and they effectively take the pressure off the manufacturers themselves. This is one way to envisage a future that contains the majority of a lighting manufacturer's output. But we have to create a usedluminaire model alongside – and that’s going to take some effort.
At least we have a short amount of time before this becomes a pressing issue. Circular economy fixtures are only just coming onstream. It’ll be a number of years before the majority of those fixtures will require some kind of refurbishment. That’s the amount of time that the industry has to get a servicing sector in place.
John Bullock, MSLL, is principal of John Bullock Lighting Design, publisher/editor of The Light Review and a regular commentator/speaker on the circular economy.
The SLL is currently developing a Lighting Factfile on the circular economy.
Background to the circular economy
The modern concept of the circular economy came out of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002) and The Upcycle (2013), the influential books by William McDonough and Richard Braungart. McDonough, a US architect, and Braungart, a German chemist and founding member of Germany's Green Party, insisted that the linear cradle-to-grave approach was no longer fit for purpose and proposed a system of product design that ensured that materials remained ’in play’ rather than being lost to landfill. https://mcdonough.com/writings/cradle-cradle-remaking-way-make-things/ https://mcdonough.com/writings/the-upcycle
The Cradle-to-Cradle philosophy influenced Ellen MacArthur, who saw the impact on the world’s oceans as a long-distance yachtswoman. She launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2010, dedicated to developing a circular economy. MacArthur was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2012. That led to the WEF’s Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE), launched in 2017 to develop financial models for circular economy projects.
www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/ www.weforum.org/projects/circular-economy
