Lighting Advocacy Letter

The Lighting Advocacy Letter is an initiative by lighting specifiers to accelerate the sustainability of lighting products. Inspired by the AIA Materials Pledge, the letter is intended to inspire a collective dialogue with the lighting manufacturing community about how to align intent and action around a common framework for sustainability. If you are a lighting designer or specifier, this letter is your opportunity to publicly commit to making more informed material choices and specification changes and supporting an ongoing dialogue with manufacturers to reduce the impacts of the built environment.

This letter and its signatories is posted on mindful MATERIALS, a neutral space supporting the action behind these public commitments. 

Are you a manufacturer, interested in responding to these letters, being a part of the Pledge dialogue or supporting these efforts generally? Send us a note at outreach@mindfulmaterials.com with the subject line "Manufacturer Materials Pledge" to learn how you can get involved in our efforts to connect the dots with mindful MATERIALS.

July 14, 2021

 

Dear Lighting Manufacturer,

As members of the lighting specifier community, we are working to accelerate a transformation in the manufacturing industry. Inspired by the 2019 AIA Materials Pledge, we are united across disciplines in a common goal: ensuring that healthy, high performing luminaires become the industry standard. We all want our projects to positively impact human health, the climate, the environment, and society.

As designers and specifiers, we are committed to the five areas of concern in the 2019 AIA Materials Pledge: 

• Human Health - Preferring products which support and foster life throughout their life cycles and seek to eliminate the use of substances that are hazardous to humans.
• Climate Health - Selecting/giving preference to products with lower embodied carbon.
• Ecosystem Health - Preferring products which sustain and regenerate the natural air, water, and biological cycles of life through thoughtful supply chain management and restorative company practices.
• Social Health and Equity - Preferring products from manufacturers who secure human rights in their operations and supply chains, and which provide positive impacts for their workers and the communities where they operate.
• Circular Economy - Preferring products that are designed for long life, with end-of-life solutions in mind and enabling a closed-loop manufacturing cycle.

To address these concerns and meet our goal of transforming the industry, we each commit to continuously updating our specifications and sharing best practices, tools, and education to require transparency on material content and optimized luminaires.  We further commit to giving priority in our specifications to those products and manufactures that:

• Provide publicly available material ingredient disclosure information
• Provide publicly available environmental impact disclosure information
• Do not stop at material transparency, but strive for optimization

To achieve this goal, we must work together as designers, specifiers, building owners, developers, manufacturers, and contractors to build awareness, share knowledge, drive demand, and deliver solutions.  We ask you as responsible manufacturers for your commitment to working towards luminaire industry transformation. To accelerate this mission and to leverage cross-industry insight and expertise, we seek your partnership in advancing this conversation at upcoming industry conferences and tradeshows.

We value our relationship with each of you and understand that the change we seek will not be accomplished overnight. Please join us in continued dialogue and collaboration as we learn from each other and improve our lighting industry together.

Sincerely,

LIGHTING ADVOCACY LETTER SIGNATORIES

 

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