Many consumers are excited to be ‘green’ in any way they can … one example of contradictory things that can also be true. This compact-fluorescent (CFL) and LED frenzy has placed half the facts and the long-term true sustainability perspectives in the shadows. Sustainability challenges us to design with the intent of having true recycling of product life-cycles, cradle-to-cradle is now a common term for many industries, but not particularly the lighting industry. Instead many LED products have disappointing single use cradle-to-grave life-cycles. If we zoom out to include the whole process of manufacturing and delivering an LED fixture to someone’s space (a product’s embodied energy) before we decide sound-bite short definitive statements such as “all incandescent bulbs to be banned by 2012”, or California legislature’s proposed efforts “How Many Legislators does it take to Change a Light Bulb Act”.
What the discussions are currently focused on is the reduction of operating energy. Only considering the energy a light bulb uses while it’s on. A pretty important factor when it comes to saving money on your electric bill, or using less energy generated by coal-fired power plants. However, residential lighting comprises only about 10 percent of the average homeowner’s electricity use, while water heaters, air conditioners, refrigerators, washers, dryers and televisions consume much more energy.
What would be good to do now is begin to also include the embodied energy of these lighting options in our discussions. How much energy is used in the manufacturing of each of these different types of light sources? This includes how much energy was used in obtaining raw goods, manufacturing, transporting, and installing these light sources. For example, LEDs have many more parts, are made from many more parts of nature, and typically LEDs travel many more miles from start to finish than an incandescent lamp.
Self-ballasted compact-fluorescent lamps (the kind being proposed for every consumer to replace their household incandescent lamps with) have plastics, electronics, lead and mercury in both the lamp and the ballast. Because of this high level of mercury they are classified as hazardous waste, and are not compliant with the EPA’s Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP). Every lamp must be handled properly by consumers, or years from now we will be challenged by the added effects of more mental health problems caused by more mercury leaching into water supplies. Already high mercury level advisories are in effect for fish caught from bodies of water in all 50 states.
Speaking of Recycling. Rarely observed phenomenon is that most people don’t recycle fluorescent lamps. The state of Missouri recently conducted a study to find out how many businesses which use fluorescent lamps in overhead lighting were recycling spent lamps. Turns out only about 20%, and this is something actually required by a 1999 law for businesses, unenforceable or unenforced. My guess it’s a combination as well as the businesses are uninformed. The state of Missouri estimates 3,000 tons of fluorescent lamps, (500 total pounds of mercury) are ending up in their landfills annually, where it then seeps into water supplies
An incandescent lamp is typically made of a metal screw base, glass envelope, tungsten filament, and a vacuum to prevent the filament from burning up in an instant. Fairly simple list of ingredients on the box would read: aluminum (socket), tungsten (filament), halogen and/or nitrogen, argon, krypton or other inert gas.
A compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) is composed of a similar aluminum screw base, a much more complicated glass envelope (especially if it’s a spiral model), and then all similarities stop. Most CFLs (if being used to screw into sockets replacing incandescent lamps) are self-ballasted. This means that there is a small component which regulates the electricity and the process that is happing inside the lamp to make it start (it needs a jump start), and then to simmer down to its power sipping operating state. Switching these on and off frequently considerably reduces the lamp’s life. We’re beginning to see many more additional elements from the earth in raw materials. Circuit boards and solder (lead), a drop of mercury, and assemblies that often are manufactured now in China, Hungary, Mexico, etc., then shipped to the United States for further integration. Perhaps there’s a much bigger picture of embodied energy it took to manufacture than we consider. How much energy at the end of the lamp’s life will be needed to recycle this hazardous waste and plastic, but also useful metals such as copper or aluminum (which is infinitely recyclable).
Manufacturers need to offer to take back the entire lamp and recycle every component possible, and seek to reduce amounts of anything that is not reusable. This goes for CFLs, and for LEDs.
An LED manufacturer in the commercial lighting business introduced last year a rather large plastic LED fixture that is intended to be thrown out in 10 years when it’s burned out, as it will be considered “obsolete” by whatever technology creates in the next 10 years. Perhaps obsolete in part, but any new plastic is with us forever. Plastic is partially recyclable with quite a bit of additional energy input (embodied energy) but plastic will never degrade back into anything other than the toxic components it was originally made from. Manufacturers might emphasize more sustainable solutions where just the LED card can be replaced in 10 years.
Additional parts of the LED process require ultra clean laboratory conditions with clinical water systems to create the initial node or chip, shipping to another facility for lensing, or onto the circuit boards, then shipping to perhaps a 4th facility for integration with lighting fixtures, then finally shipping to the distributor, and the end-user. There’s a ton more embodied energy involved here than with the standard incandescent bulb which would simply need to go from factory to distributor.
But how much embodied energy? The only information being discussed is operating information. How bright is it, how many watts does it use, how many hours will it typically last before I need a new one? How much will that new one cost?
Embodied energy costs money too. Shipping over great distances costs money, requiring laboratory clean room conditions to make an LEDs costs money. Can we guess by looking at the difference in price between two technologies … factoring for supply and demand somehow too? Is that a reasonable estimation of how much more embodied energy there is in manufacturing? It’s the only way we are able to guess-timate at this time.
Let’s make a food analogy for a second. The USDA Food Pyramid recommends American’s eat 2,000 to 2,500 calories each day. Typical Americans (on average) consume 46,000 calories per DAY. . . First, that’s 2,500 calories of food plus the energy spent getting your food to the market. Now, this is just like what we’re missing in the “green” sustainable lighting discussions. Everything else is just energy-efficiency talk.
The approach we’re missing to sustainability as Americans seems to parallel our increasingly disconnected way of acting without long-term perspectives. We can’t sustain here by conquering nature with science, we’re focused now to understand what sustains the most healthful life, with stewardship of this planet. Sustainability means a process that is able to be sustained, ideal fully-sustainable processes keep looping continuously. It requires us to look at the big picture. To look beyond the 4-year-term of a politician. The “How Many Legislators does it take to Change a Light Bulb Act” in California is an example of this very important push for energy-efficiency gone awry. It’s not the same as sustainability, it’s not necessarily ‘green’.
During the 1970s energy crisis quality of light was upstaged by banks of fluorescent lamps in commercial spaces, constant uniform and ‘efficient’ light became the standard. It has taken the lighting industry years to begin to burn away the lighting karma of that past, but here in 2007 we’re seeing history repeating. Just as science is suggesting that all this fluorescent light is not really so good for our health, especially after sundown.
When we include the biology of lighting, (a subject for another detailed discussion, but certainly part of the sustainability matrix we need to consider) discovers the human body functions properly with dimmed warmer sources of light in the afternoon and night becoming dark for better immune system support and proper circadian rhythm. Cancer is better treated at night. If I replace all my dimmed high-efficiency incandescent halogen lamps with non-dimmable compact-fluorescent, I am not going to be getting the soft warm glow nature prefers because fluorescents are inherently high in blue light and less inclusive of warm light wavelengths.
I propose it might be truly better for the environment and our health to try some other options. Switch off lights during the day and use as much daylight as possible. Use high-efficiency, long-life halogen lamps on dimmers. Dimmers allow flexibility, ability to use a fraction of the energy, and extend the life of any incandescent or halogen lamp by an inverse ratio to the dimmer level (10% down on dimmer = 2 times the lamp life, 50% down on dimmer = 20 times the lamp life). Need a bit more to clean up, raise the lighting for the time needed. Flexibility and comfort are tremendously increased. No ballasts, no mercury, no hazardous waste recycling. The green power options available in my city also allow me to indirectly pay for solar and hydroelectric power sources in the northeast. Also it’s good to note that the mercury output of coal fired power plants (that statistic that you are told you are lowering by replacing incandescent lamps with CFLs) is highly regulated and on targets for reduction annually. These mercury output levels are tight and tightening. Telling consumers to go buy a bunch of new technology, or in the case of a commercial client – telling them to spend 4 times more on LED systems because they will be doing their duty as citizens of this planet or else evil doers – has got to stop. All these technologies have their application and responsible approaches.
The Department of Energy (DOE) in December 2006 released findings of a field-study done on the efficacy of LEDs (lumens output per watt consumed) currently on the market. Concealing the names of the manufactuers, they tested LED systems – specificlly releaseing 4 studies done with 2 downlights and 2 task lights. Manufacturers claimed 30-50 lumers/watt output. Which supports the energy-efficiency attention and excitement. DOE tests showed 10-15 lumens/watt actual output in an actual system. Their conclusion is the numbers are closer to raw LED node performance at the lab and not numbers that we can expect in finished products after several stages of assembly and lensing. Standards committees are very busy, but meanwhile it’s like the wild west out there.
All of this sounds very harowing. I may even come off as sounding negative or a nay-sayer on all of the paradigm shift and call for action that is desperately needed right now. Sustainability is very real. The need for action is overwhelming. I am calling on all of the lighting industry to consider what I am discussing here.
