Highlights
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2024-03-16 10:08 In 2015, he left academia to start working in the light and design industry as the leader of Trilux Lighting research team, where one of his roles is to coordinate the participation of Trilux in joint research projects, one of them being reprolite, a research project that aims to support the european lighting industry in moving towards a more sustainable and competitive future.
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2024-03-16 10:11 That’s what the lighting industry looked at for very long times, steadily increasing the lumens, perots and so on. But the second facet is the material usage.
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2024-03-16 10:12 On the one hand the energy usage, and there we have 1% of the energy usage in the production phase, whereas we have 99% in the use phase. The second perspective should be on the material usage.
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2024-03-16 12:34 The mechanics, the wiring and the optics are relatively unimportant in this context, and that’s a problem. So the ecological importance and the physical weight of the parts just measured in kilogram are disproportionate. This misleads our intuition. So we might think that you can just replace an LED module and a control gear, keeping the housing in continued use, and do something good for the environment. But when you are disposing of the LED module and the control gear, you are throwing away 80% to 90% of the ecologically relevant material measured in this ADP elements metric.
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2024-03-16 10:17 Because 25% saving is much more than you could expect from any other means, for example, from future improvements of LED efficacies, which will be much lower than this 25% energy saving potential that we have in hand with light management.
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2024-03-16 10:23 But in fact, one of the outcomes of rapolite was that the possibility to exchange the LED modules is not beneficial when it comes to CO2 reduction and the reduction of material usage measured in this ADP elements which I mentioned before.
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2024-03-16 10:27 And we approached this with various scenario calculations and they showed no quantified benefits of replaceable LEd modules in our application that is currently being published also in a scientific journal.
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2024-03-16 10:38 Meaning that renovation cycles are probably shorter nowadays than the service life of the fixtures. Yeah. So this is really the crucial question when you want to improve the sustainability.
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2024-03-16 10:41 So I’ve had projects where we are using luminars that are upcycled or luminars are even out of the catalog of some manufacturers and that lie on their storage room.
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2024-03-16 10:43 And I think that is also on us as specialists to put always quality first, but also when it comes to if there are products that maybe still work pretty fine.
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2024-07-06 15:41 The fewer LEDs you are using, the higher is the current through one LEd and the more will be the aging of one Led. And then you get to shorter lifetimes, but also to shorter material usage for the luminaire.
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2024-03-16 10:48 I mean, if you have the information that, okay, we are designing a restaurant and this restaurant will be completely refurbished after six years or after eight years, then you could plan to have luminaries that actually will live that life.
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2024-03-16 10:50 On the other hand, if you observe people who have to buy a smartphone for maybe €800 on your own, these people might be willing to use it for much longer than two years. So doing something as a service is often mentioned as part of the circular economy, but it does not guarantee a lower environmental impact.
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2024-03-16 10:58 Well, the first priority would still be to increase the energy efficiency, by all means, because we have seen that 99% of the CO2 emissions are generated in the use phase and not in the production phase, and also to use light management systems or technologies like constant light output in order to generate further energy savings in the use phase.
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2024-07-06 17:53 He said, everything that is loved is sustainable. And I think that’s not only important for the lighting industry, it is something that everyone can respect in its everyday consumer behavior.