Eco-friendly lighting is a holistic approach to lighting – it can’t be achieved through simply buying an eco-friendly product or investing in a sustainable solution alone.
Eco-friendly lighting is a set of qualities in both the lighting products and their design which work together to have a less detrimental effect on our environment. Eco-friendly choices can be made from the bulbs and fixtures to the design and layout, right through to your power choice, so it really is a holistic approach.
Eco-friendly lighting products and solutions are a no-brainer when you’re investing in new lighting designs, but many products can also be retrofitted to increase their sustainability and eco-friendliness.
Conserving electricity, whether through maintenance, ever-advancing technologies, and installation logistics can save both the environment, and your pocket – whether you’re a business owner or homeowner!
We explore some of the benefits of choosing to go more eco-friendly below.
The main priority for most of us when opting for eco-friendly choices is the Greener, more sustainable impact. Consumers are growing ever more conscious of our greenhouse gas emissions, and electricity production produced a whopping 21% of UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 – which gives you a clue as to the importance of more sustainable choices. It’s a crucial one to tackle. We’re not relying heavily on renewable energy choices yet, with 60% of American electricity coming from burning fossil fuels.
Because eco-friendly lighting is a holistic approach, as we mentioned above, you have to consider the process as a whole. That means not just choosing the eco-friendly fitting but looking into what supplies your eco-friendly fitting. Making the choice to avoid fossil fuels, and opting for a supplier who uses and invests heavily in renewables, means that you can build sustainability and eco-consciousness into every part of your lighting journey.
We’re all becoming fed up with ‘fast fashion’, and products with built-in redundancy that no longer work after a couple of years. Eco-friendly choices often consider this, creating more hard-wearing and longer-lasting products so that once you invest you won’t have to invest again – and less goes to waste.
Eco-friendly product choices should also consider the environment in their manufacture. That often means they won’t be made out of polluting products, or those that aren’t environmentally sustainable. If you choose wood as a material, for example, a truly eco-friendly product will ensure that the wood is responsibly sourced from sustainable, managed woodland.
This is most consumers’ first act when it comes to making a more eco-conscious choice for home lighting. Eco-friendly LED bulbs use an awful lot less energy – between 25 and 80% less than incandescent bulbs. That can save you money, too – the average switch out to eco-friendly light bulbs can save a household £70 per year.
There are three different types of ‘eco-friendly’ bulbs – LED, CFL, and halogen incandescent – but LED is far and away the most eco-conscious. For comparison, to create the same brightness as a 60W incandescent bulb would take 42W for halogen incandescent, 15W for CFL, and 12W for LED. Add to that that LED bulbs can last for twenty-five years (against a measly 750 hours for an incandescent bulb!).
It sounds obvious, but the best source of full-spectrum light is sunlight! When designing a home or revamping, it’s well worth considering skylight windows to enable you to make the most of sunlight – as well as putting as many windows on the south-facing side of your property as possible (in the Northern hemisphere, that is! In the Southern hemisphere, do the reverse!). You can even take this further by installing light wells or fibre optics to channel sunlight in from outside.
We all love a warm, relaxing glow to light our spaces during the darker days of the year. But you don’t need to resort to plentiful outdoor lighting, or countless secondary lamps around your home, if you don’t want to. If you want to add that constant warm glow to outdoor spaces, consider solar powered lights. If security and safe movement outdoors at night are your priority, opt for motion-activated lighting. For a similar glow inside, consider ditching the overheads and gently lighting your space with candles.
Rather than brightly illuminating the whole kitchen to help you chop that onion come nightfall, why not choose task lighting and illuminate the chopping area, for example with an undercounter spot? This approach works throughout the house – choose a directed bedside lamp for reading, for example, or next to the sofa for reading, or beneath a banister to illuminate a staircase. Not only is it a much more efficient use of light than bathing the whole house in an ambient glow, it also creates more of an intimate feeling of ‘hygge’ come nightfall.
No longer the constant whirr of interrupt circuitry; advancements in the tech used in dimmers means their usage can save you a significant amount in lighting bills. You may also see benefits to your quality of life, too, as you can light your spaces more gently come evening, so as not to interrupt the circadian rhythms telling you it’s time for bed. Dimmers mean your bulb uses less wattage, which also extends the life of your light bulb.
Whether you’re planning a wholesale redesign or looking to retrofit your home to be more eco-conscious, eco-friendly lighting is a great consideration. Check out our huge range of lighting fixtures, fittings and accessories here.
