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The second Zero Carbon Lighting Conference, organised by Recolight, will be taking place in London at the end of April.
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So, where are we with Net Zero?
It’s a topic – if you can call an existential crisis a ‘topic’ that is being heavily politicised by those with a different agenda than worrying about the state of the civiised world in a generation’s time. We talk about the ability of the human mind to ignore the big thing, using the Power of the Small to occupy our attention – like trying to get a wine stain out of a new carpet while the house is sliding off the edge of a cliff – or down a sink-hole.
And that ‘generation’s time’ doesn’t help. The curse of the internet means that we expect an immediate response to everything – the ‘you can view all episodes NOW on . . .’ syndrome. Talking about something that may not happen in your own lifetime – possibly not even in your children’s lifetime – then WHY ON EARTH are be bothering with all this stuff?
Of course, the real world still exists outside of social media, sound bites and ‘great television’. That’s why one-day focus events like Recolight’s Net Zero Lighting Conference are so important. Because – like it or not – we need to plan.
And I fear that its not just about de-carbonisation to pre-industrial levels (damn that James Watt and his portable rotary power machines). Before we were worrying about the climate crisis – about twenty years ago – we thought we had a resources crisis. Figures for global reserves of minerals were suggesting that, without serious change in the way that we build things, we would be in serious trouble for a lack of raw materials.
Welcome to the mineral wars.
While we’ve been preferring to not do much about Net Zero, that material scarcity issue has been gaining traction and its now built up a serious head of steam; and its beginning to play out militarily, as you may have noticed.
But it was reported at the weekend that its not so much the rare earths and the new minerals on the block that will cause us headaches – though they surely will. It could well be a far friendlier metal – copper. The projected extraction rate for copper suggests that the next ten years will see the same amount of copper mined than in the entire 20th century. It is a ludicrous picture to try and get our heads around. We might worry about indium or lithium and all the other -ums, but COPPER?!? Copper has been our best friend for centuries and there is no way we can live without it.
No – there is no way we can have a lighting industry without it; copper is in everything electrical, and while science is looking to find ways to extract the metal without the brute force that’s traditionally been required, what scale can we expect such bio-sensitive extraction to achieve – and in what time frame.
The use of copper is being driven heavily by the need to remove fossil-fuels from the industrial chain and move to – yes, you got it – electrical means of production (and portable rotary power). So while we sit at the Net Zero Lighting Conference, we might like to scribble a few design ideas for how to develop luminaires that, for one, use much les natural material and, once made, last an awful lot longer. Because that will all help towards a Net Zero future.
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I seem to have strayed into those other two headline activities at Recolight: Circular Economy and Life Cycle Assessment.
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I’ll finish with a lift from the Net Zero Lighting Conference webpage:
In this one-day event we bring together a range of experts from both the lighting industry and other sectors to advise on best practice in taking your journey to ‘net zero’. The event will be chaired by Ray Molony.
The agenda has been carefully curated to help all those involved in the manufacture and specification of lighting equipment understand how to meet the net zero challenge.
Questions to be tackled in this vital event are:
- How can lighting manufacturers reduce the carbon footprint of manufacturing and transporting luminaires?
- How can they respond to the increasing requirements of public and private sector customers for progress on achieving net zero?
- With a limited budget, should we focus on Science Based Targets, Ecovadis, B Corp or other certification regimes? And to what extent will they really help us to reach net zero?
- What are the priorities, the ‘quick wins’ and real challenges?
- How can we cut carbon, energy use and waste without compromising quality or customer service?
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And that sounds all very right and proper to me – I’ll see you there.
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