greenlight alliance
Changing the System: Going beyond the luminaire to deliver true circularity Tim Bowes
Tim Bowes of Whitecroft Lighting calls for a mindset shift regarding circularity, inviting several guest contributors to provide real-world examples of how circular approaches can realise economic, social, and environmental benefits.
In the lighting world, we talk a lot about circularity. We celebrate the modular products, the recycled housings, the remanufactured luminaires that get a second life. But to enable true circularity, a lot of the real action happens long before a product ever reaches a workshop bench. Circularity isn’t a feature you can bolt on; it’s a mindset, a network of decisions today and in the future, and a shift in how organisations behave together. Without this mindset change, much of the effort we celebrate today will be wasted as products end up in landfill or downcycled. Leaning on several schools of thought, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) summarises the Circular Economy (CE) into three key principles: Eliminate Waste & Pollution; Circulate Products & Materials; and Regenerate Nature. Crucially, to enable those principles to become reality, the CE is underpinned by two key principles: a shift to renewable energy and system thinking. It is this latter principle that turns the business-as-usual to real change. But what is a system and system thinking? Donella Meadows, a systems expert, describes a system as ‘an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organised in a way that achieves something’. The EMF uses the parable of the blind men and the elephant to explain this concept. The parable tells the story of a city whose inhabitants are blind. When a king arrives riding on an elephant, the blind men rush forward to touch the elephant. In isolation each blind man thinks they are touching something different, the man touching the trunk thinks he is touching a snake, and another who touches the tusk claiming he was touching a spear. The lesson the parable is telling is that to really understand something we must understand how one piece is part of something far bigger. As John Muir observed, “When we try to pick out everything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the Universe”. The delivery of a building today (as with many other sectors), is like the blind men from the parable, made up of a series of disconnected ‘silos’. While
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ours focuses on the lighting part of a project, every decision we make is directly or indirectly hitched to every other part of the building (and conversely on what we do). In some cases, this will be positive, in others it will be having an adverse effect. Often, we will never know about these positive and adverse effects of our choices. But what would happen if everyone took a step back, zoomed out from their own responsibility and looked at the ecosystem around it: the procurement routes, the maintenance teams, the designers, the contractors, the clients, the design and the cultural habits that shape what “normal” looks like. We are starting to see applied examples in the delivery of buildings, and routes to retain the value of the assets and not taking the ‘default’ approaches today, of down cycling or landfill. These examples aren’t just theory but about changing business-as-usual (BAU) in ways that are practical, collaborative and positive. These approaches are moving on from focusing simply on the product itself as the end point of circular design, but realise that the product is the springboard to deliver increased material value and true circularity. These examples make us realise that our ‘buildings are goldmines’, where the products and materials are “repleters” not “depleters” within our economy if we can extract and create the conditions to reuse, regenerate and prolong their life, and not just recycle the materials. These approaches show that with open and engaging collaboration across all stakeholders, small tweaks can be realised to the ‘solution’, far greater value can be realised for all. Finally, these solutions identify how embedding technology and innovative ideas in the initial design can deliver not just benefits for the delivery but also simplification in extracting the value time and time again. Looking across our industry, these examples show how adopting the circular economy in an industry that traditionally ‘hinders transformative change’, can realise economic, social, and environmental benefits for all.