2023 The Path to Sustainable Lighting

Implementing strategies to tackle the climate emergency is now a duty for all industrial sectors. Lighting plays a major role in modern society, therefore a shift towards more sustainable lighting products will bring important benefits to the environment. Following the principles of the circular economy, maintaining the product’s value high for longer and making sure that the environmental impact of each life-cycle stage of the product is unequivocally quantified and kept at its minimum are some of the strategies that can be implemented by designers and manufacturers to meet the needs of low impact luminaire production.

Learning Objectives

1. Definition of circular economy and how to recognise and quantify the circularity of lighting products.
2. How to increase the service life of lighting products.
3. Definition of environmental impact of lighting products and how to quantify it using different metrics.
4. How to involve the whole lighting community to contribute to the achievement of low impact luminaires.

Ruairidh McGlynn
Head of Specification Support, Stoane Lighting

With a background in product design and engineering, Ruairidh has worked within the lighting industry for 15 years and leads the specification support department at Stoane Lighting.
Collaborating with Lighting specifiers to help realize their designs, he is motivated by sustainable and circular design, with a particular interest in the renewal of existing products and schemes.

Outside of the Lighting industry, Ruairidh works as an artist documenting the impact of the climate crisis on the landscape. Recently exhibiting his work as part of British Journal of Photography’s ‘Decade of Change’ Exhibition, including some of the world’s most powerful creative responses to the climate crisis that has been shown as part of New York Climate week and at Hong Kong’s Museum of Climate change.

Dr. Irene Mazzei
KTP Associate – Edinburgh Napier University/Mike Stoane Lighting Ltd.

Irene is a PhD Chemist with a strong materials science background. The projects she’s worked on have always had sustainability as a backbone, and spaced from gas capture and separation to feedstock valorization considering the principles of Green Chemistry. She is strongly motivated by the need to have concrete initiatives to promote sustainability and recognizes the importance of raising awareness on how much human activities have an impact on the environment.

She has been working as a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) Associate with Edinburgh Napier University and Mike Stoane Lighting on a project focused on the development of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology specific for the lighting industry. To do so, she has been working in direct contact with lighting designers and manufacturers, quantifying the environmental impact of their products using LCA and other methodologies.

She is also involved in the dissemination of her LCA studies, academically and commercially.