Darren Beckley: Climate change is a daily media conversation.
And I think that most of us in entertainment lighting, are now
firmly signed up to the fact that we need to do as much as possible
to help the environmental cause.
Today we want to ask the question, "what decisions can we make to reduce climate
change in entertainment lighting?"
We must consider that every purchase has a consequence.
So just how do you make an educated decision?
After all it's all of us that are responsible.
So with more information, will the decisions we make be different?
We're going to talk about the carbon footprint of a product and
we'll use carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in grams,
kilos, and tons as a measurement.
So here's some context to help illustrate the points.
According to the climate neutral group website, a metric ton of CO2
is equivalent to an average petrol car traveling around the Netherlands
for just under 10,000 kilometers or an electric car for just over 11,000.
It's 72 trips between Amsterdam and Paris on the train, or 2.6 economy
flights between Amsterdam and Rome.
It volumes out to be equivalent to 500 CO2 fire extinguishers, and
it will take 50 trees to grow for one year to capture this carbon.
Now, obviously this is a very general comparison.
There are many assumptions and caveats.
So if anyone wants to see more detail, you can check this out on
the climate neutral group's websites.
We're going to look at the four stages of a product life cycle: manufacturing,
distribution, usage, and end of life.
This presentation comes with some caveats.
As an industry, we have a long way to go when it comes to collecting
data that will allow us to truly assess our carbon footprint.
Therefore, the numbers that we use today will be indicative and serve
to demonstrate the points made about the environmental impact of product.
Let's start with stage one, manufacturing.
This is by far the most complex issue.
We're frequently asked questions like "how much embodied carbon is in your product?"
But what does that even mean?
Well, very simply embodied carbon is the carbon footprint of a product when
it rolls off the manufacturing line.
For us to establish the embodied carbon number, we would first need to understand
how much carbon is produced in each of the components that make the product.
We would need to understand the volume, weight, distance traveled,
and energy used in the manufacturing process, but that's not all.
These components are generally made from raw materials, which
typically have their own journey.
Think about a semiconductor or a glass lens.
The location where they're constructed is not the start of their carbon journey.
The journey started as soon as the minerals were mined.
I think you get the point, right?
It's complex.
Generally, materials are moved to component manufacturing locations,
components are made, then either move to assembly location, or as is often
the case in our industry, they're moved to locations where sub-assemblies are
made and then to a final assembly point.
Take Source Four LED as an example, this product utilizes over 1,400
components, which are sourced from 17 countries around the world.
Also consider that this is a fairly efficient product to build as we
do not bring in sub-assemblies, we manufacture from component level
ourselves in the U S and the component mass volumes out to be quite small.
Certainly when compared to automated lighting, which can have upwards
of three times the mass and three times the component count.
At this point, I just want to draw some comparative data from other industries.
Research carried out in the U S suggests a typical smartphone has
55 kilograms of embodied carbon, and a Surface laptop has 119.
We believe this range could be indicative to that of a generic
LED luminaire in our industry.
A retrofit LED engine might be at the lower end and the complete
ellipsoidal at the upper end.
Obviously these are very rough comparisons designed to give you an
idea in terms of order of magnitude.
But let's remember these figures as we'll refer back to them later,
when we build up a picture of the overall carbon footprint of a product.
It sounds obvious, but it's worth remembering, if it's complex and
heavy, it's likely to have a large carbon footprint out of the box.
If it's simple and light, that carbon footprint will likely be smaller.
So it's really important to think about what you need.
Retrofit LED upgrades can be a good, low carbon option, if you
already have a tungsten fixture.
They'll save you money too.
Now let's move on to stage two, distribution.
Whilst it sounds straightforward, the choices you make could
significantly increase or decrease the carbon footprint of your product.
There are four traditional methods for moving goods around the
world: sea, air, road, and rail.
Sea and rail freight produces similar amount of carbon, roughly
15 grams per ton per kilometer.
Road freight is slightly higher at just over 60 grams, and air freight
comes in a whopping 540 grams.
Now let's take our Source Four LED, this fixture weighs 8.9 kilos.
If you're a buyer in London, your Source Four will need to travel just
over 1,600 kilometers by road and just under 6,000 kilometers by sea
given the product 1.4 kilos of carbon.
If we decided to air freight, it would increase the produced carbon
number to 30.3 kilos costing the environment 19 times more.
But why would a company like ETC use air when we could do sea?
Well, the truth is we don't want to.
It's expensive for us, and it's expensive for the planet.
To counter this, we invest in local stocking facilities
and we fill them with stock.
This gives us stock to service local customers, whilst we
replenish using sea freight.
Whilst this helps, it does not alleviate the problem.
We still have situations where clients want product quickly
and our local stock has run out.
Another area for development in our industry is localized
manufacturing and short supply chain.
We've recently started a program with Sensor power control
modules and Source 4WRDs.
If you're a customer in Europe or the Middle East, and you buy a
Source 4WRD or Sensor module, it will come from our manufacturing
facility in Ada, the Netherlands.
This cuts down the carbon footprint and speeds up delivery time.
Our industry has lots of room for improvement when
it comes to moving product.
My advice is to find out where your product is coming from,
and how it's getting to you.
Where possible try to avoid air freight.
Now that we have our fixture, we can look at stage three, usage.
Energy usage is a big fish in the carbon footprint of an
entertainment lighting product.
And there is a lot that we can do and have been doing in this area.
If we step back in time to the 1980s and before, theaters were lit with
1.2 and two kilowatt luminaires.
In 1991, the Source Four was released and it produced the same
amount of light for half the energy.
Then around 10 years ago, the Source Four turned LED and reduce
that energy usage by a further 75%.
This is a massive improvement, especially when you consider the saving does
not just materialize in the energy use for powering the luminaire.
The venue will also require much less cooling.
So there's another saving there too.
Moving lights have not progressed as well, in my opinion, even LED lights
use quite power hungry engines ranging from about 280 to over one kilowatt.
There's a reason for this.
Firstly, they have a condensed optical system.
Most pushed light through a small gobo gate and multiple lenses.
This is done in order to make moving lights compact and feature rich.
It does have its upsides.
You can certainly argue that because of moving light can do so much more
than a generic, it has a large offset.
I think this is true, as long as your moving light is replacing the
work of multiple generics or doing something that a generic cannot do.
However, if you have a moving light that is acting as a generic, it is
of course, costing the planet more.
So how much carbon are these fixtures producing?
Well, to answer that question, we're going to have to dive back into the maths.
Let's look at a lineup of generic fixtures.
At the top, we have our typical usage, we've gone for three hours a day,
six days a week, and 50 weeks a year.
This is just our assessment of typical usage.
Here in the top right, we can see how much carbon the UK produces for each
kilowatt hour of electricity it delivers.
In the left column, we can see the fixtures next their associated power
consumption, and then power usage in a year based on typical usage figures.
Then we can see how much CO2 that fixture produces in a year.
You can see the drop-off when you get to LED fixtures, which is great news.
But this is not really a fair assessment as the fixtures are
outputting different brightnesses.
Now let's reveal the lumen output of each fixture.
If we take that lumen output number and divide it by the power draw, we
get lumens per watt, which reveals the true efficiency of the fixture.
When thinking about LED in comparison to tungsten, there's
more you need to consider.
This information here demonstrates the worst case scenario for LED.
And that's because we're making white lights, which is when
they're at their least efficient.
As soon as you start mixing color, the additive color mixing system of
the LED is becoming more efficient because we're turning LEDs off.
Whereas the subtractive color system in tungsten is becoming less
efficient as the gel color only lets a certain amount of light through.
To demonstrate this we're going to compare Source Four Series
Two LED and Source Four tungsten.
We'll have both fixtures produce half CT blue, and we'll adjust the intensity
to be level with the weakest fixture, which in this case is the tungsten.
By doing this, we can see that the tungsten uses 750 Watts, but
the Series Two only uses 111.
Series Two is using 85% less power in this scenario.
ETC worked very hard on the optical efficiency of fixtures.
Whilst I'd like to say this is to reduce the product's carbon footprint.
There are other considerations in play.
One of those is reduced heat gain output, which allows the cooling fans
to run slower and the LEDs to last.
The benefits of this are that you have a much quieter fixture, which is still able
to operate at a high intensity level.
And I'm not talking about silent mode, which reduces the output.
We genuinely just don't need as much cooling.
And if the LEDs are not running as hot, they're last longer, thus giving the
fixture a longer lifespan, which is one of the reasons we feel confident
given the LED engine in our fixtures, a ten-year warranty, and the fixtures
have passed the LM-84 test process.
As we move on to stage four, I want to come back to the carbon number that the
fixtures produce in a year and compare to the embodied carbon number from earlier.
When we consider that comparison, it is likely that the building of
a fixture is comparative to two to three years of fixture usage.
This brings the environmental importance of fixture longevity into stark contrast.
In recent years, there's been a consumer boom in low cost manufacturing.
And in some cases, the old adage of "if you buy cheap, you buy
twice" has been deemed acceptable.
I'm sure we've all heard comments.
Like "it's fine if it doesn't last that long, it's good enough
and cheap enough to replace."
Well, fiscally that argument may stack up, environmentally It does not!
For fixtures to last, they need to be well-designed, well-built, well-supported,
and parts needs to be readily available, even for a sustained period, after the
fixture is discontinued or superseded.
Doing this cost manufacturers money, it's a big commitment, but ultimately
the planet needs manufacturers to do it.
So let's look at the carbon footprint of a Source Four Series
Two luminaire over a 10 year period.
If we use the embodied carbon number from a Surface laptop as a reference,
we would have 119 kilos of carbon embodied in the manufacturing process.
If we use efficient transport, we can expect to add another 1.4 kilos.
If we keep the luminaire for 10 years, we would add another 350 kilograms
of carbon from fixture usage.
So over a 10 year period, we will have added 470 kilograms of carbon to
the atmosphere or 47 kilos per year.
Now let's run those numbers again, but this time we'll make different choices.
We'll choose a product that uses 25% more power and has a likely usable
lifespan of five years instead of 10.
We'll also suppose that the product is delivered by air fright.
We'll use the same embodied carbon number of 119 kilos.
However, we'll need to add it twice as the product's lifespan is 50% shorter.
We'll also add air freight twice and an increase in energy usage
of 25% over the ten-year period.
Doing it this way, the fixture is going to cost the planet 700 kilograms in carbon.
It's a big difference.
If we take this and we extrapolate to a typical small to medium
theater using say 60 luminaires, the latter example is pushing an
additional 14 tons of carbon into the atmosphere over the 10 year period.
Little choices make big differences!
It's also worth noting that retrofit LED options would
further reduce the carbon output.
Obviously, there are some assumptions in these numbers.
They're not designed to give you an accurately scientific portrayal
of carbon emissions,they're to illustrate some key points.
So my summary is this, whatever you buy, stop and ask yourself
whether the decisions you're making are right for the environment.
If you need a moving light for its features, then use a moving light.
If you're considering specifying a moving light because you just don't have time
to figure out how the product's going to be used, stop and spend some time
figuring out what you're going to do.
Buy a product that will last.
This just makes good sense.
Not just from a carbon emissions point of view, but also from
the waste disposal aspect too.
Also look at how efficient the fixture is, make sure it's making
nice light at the stated efficiency and calculate your lumen per watt.
And please where possible try to avoid air freight.
Finally, I'd say this, push us the manufacturers to do more.
As an industry we can improve.
And I'm sure we will, but we'll do it faster, if customers
keep telling us we have to.