Beyond Energy Efficiency: Putting Circularity at the Heart of Lighting| Signify UK

Beyond energy efficiency: putting circularity at the heart of lighting specification

As sustainability moves from ambition to accountability, lighting needs to be assessed for more than how efficiently it uses electricity. For decades, energy efficiency has been at the heart of innovation in lighting. The transition from conventional light sources to LED has delivered significant reductions in energy consumption and associated emissions. But as designers look towards creating greater impact through sustainable innovation, another question is becoming increasingly important: what happens to the resources within a lighting product throughout its life?

This is where circularity steps in.

Beyond energy savings, the lighting sector has built a strong track record in areas such as recycling, managing hazardous substances, improving component efficiency, and enabling the repair and replacement of failing parts. The next frontier is to scale up and accelerate material efficiency. This is where a structured, consistent and harmonised circular lighting approach becomes essential.

Transitioning to circular lighting not only offers significant cost savings but can also unlock new economic opportunities. It lays the foundation for a more sustainable and resilient lighting industry and a thriving ecosystem for related businesses. For Signify, sustainability is a cornerstone of its corporate strategy, reflected in its Brighter Lives, Better World 2030 programme. Circularity is central to this vision, reflecting a commitment to responsible, future-focused practices.

To successfully implement a circular lighting strategy, four essential dimensions must work in harmony:

Design with the end in mind. Circularity begins at the design stage. Products, systems and services must be conceived with their entire lifecycle in mind, ensuring they are durable, repairable, upgradeable and recyclable.
Develop innovative business models. Designing circular solutions alone isn’t enough. Business models must encourage market acceptance, communicate and deliver added value, adapt the value chain to new realities, address emerging challenges, attract users and investment, and align with evolving customer expectations.
Close the loop through reverse logistics. Once demand is established, a reverse logistics system is essential to complete the circular loop. This enables the return, reuse, refurbishment and recycling of products and components.
Collaborate across the ecosystem. Circularity cannot succeed in isolation. It requires collaboration across the entire ecosystem.

For designers and specifiers, the challenge is not simply to select products that consume less energy. It is to understand a product more holistically – its material footprint, longevity, repairability, upgradeability, use of recycled or other non-virgin materials, and its potential for reuse or recovery at end of life.

This shift is reflected in Signify Circle, a philosophy designed to help professional customers make more informed choices in support of their circular economy ambitions. It sits within the resource-efficiency pillar of Signify’s Brighter Lives, Better World 2030 sustainability programme.

From a linear product to a circular proposition

Circularity is not a feature that can simply be added to a luminaire at the end of its development. It starts much earlier – at the design stage.

Designing for circularity requires a framework that takes a lifecycle approach, encouraging product architects, designers and engineers to consider resource efficiency, longevity and reusability from the outset. It also recognises that individual design decisions can contribute to more than one aspect of circularity. For example, a modular design could both extend product life through upgrading and enable components to be reused or recycled.

At the centre of Signify Circle are three principles: Use less. Use longer. Use again.

Use less means considering how materials and energy are used, including reducing material footprint, increasing non-virgin content and improving energy efficiency.

Use longer focuses on extending the useful life of lighting through durability, repairability and upgradeability.

Use again considers what happens when a product or component is no longer required in its original application, from reuse and refurbishment to recovering valuable parts and materials.

Represented by the continuous ring, the logo design is intentional. Circularity is not a linear sequence in which one action is completed before another begins. The principles overlap and interact throughout a product’s lifecycle.

Making circularity more than a claim

For the specification community, however, an important question remains: how can circularity be translated into something meaningful at the point of product selection?

The lighting industry contains an increasing number of environmental claims, labels and sustainability statements. Yet a label is only useful if the criteria behind it is clear, relevant and verifiable. This creates an important distinction between talking about circularity and demonstrating it.

For a specifier, the value is not necessarily in the logo itself. It is in what sits behind it: a structured assessment that provides a framework for considering the resource and lifecycle characteristics of a lighting solution.

What about EPDs then?

This is where Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) become particularly relevant.

An EPD provides transparent, standardised environmental information based on lifecycle assessment. For luminaires, product-specific rules and methodologies are being developed to establish a consistent basis for assessing environmental impacts. The Signify Circle framework identifies EPDs as underpinning many of the criteria used to determine whether a product can qualify for the programme. The relationship between the two is important.

An EPD provides environmental data; a circularity framework helps put that data into the context of circular design.

For designers and specifiers, this can support a more informed conversation.

Rather than asking only How efficient is this luminaire?, the questions can become broader: How much material does it use? What proportion comes from non-virgin sources? How long is it designed to remain in service? Can it be repaired? Can its technology be upgraded without replacing the entire product? What happens to its components at the end of its useful life? And what environmental data is available to substantiate these characteristics?

No single metric can answer all of these questions. Nor should an EPD be expected to replace a circularity assessment, or vice versa. Instead, they can provide complementary perspectives.

From energy efficiency to resource efficiency

This represents an important evolution in the way lighting sustainability is considered.

Energy efficiency remains one of the industry’s most significant contributions to reducing environmental impact. But the environmental footprint of a luminaire does not begin when it is switched on, nor does it necessarily end when it is switched off for the last time.

The materials have already been extracted, processed and manufactured. The product may subsequently be transported, installed, maintained, repaired, upgraded and eventually dismantled. Every stage presents opportunities and challenges for reducing resource consumption and retaining value.

Design therefore becomes critical. The best luminaire may no longer simply be the one that delivers the highest efficacy or the lowest energy consumption. It may also be the one that uses materials intelligently, remains useful for longer, can adapt as requirements change, and enables valuable components and materials to remain in circulation.

Designing for what comes next

The industry’s next sustainability challenge is therefore not necessarily about doing one thing differently. It is about connecting the decisions made throughout a product’s lifecycle.

EPDs can help make environmental impacts visible and comparable. Circularity frameworks can help designers and manufacturers think about how products use, retain and recover resources. Together, these approaches can contribute to a more informed specification process.

Signify Circle is one example of how this thinking can be translated into a practical framework for professional customers.

The logo is simply an identifier for products that have met defined criteria. The more significant change happens behind it – in the decisions made at the drawing board, in product development and ultimately at the point of specification.

The future of sustainable lighting will require us to think not only about how little energy a luminaire consumes, but about how intelligently it uses resources throughout its life. That is the shift from energy efficiency to resource efficiency, and it could fundamentally change the questions we ask when we specify light.

#SpecifytheCircle

About the author:

Darren Smith

About Signify

Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals and consumers and lighting for the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact connected lighting systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. In 2022, we had sales of EUR 7.5 billion, approximately 35,000 employees and a presence in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world. We achieved carbon neutrality in our operations in 2020, have been in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index since our IPO for six consecutive years and were named Industry Leader in 2017, 2018 and 2019. News from Signify is located at the Newsroom, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Information for investors can be found on the Investor Relations page.