Saturday, January 23, 2010
Bandit Lites Strives for 80% Green by December 2011
iSquint.net: "Here is an interesting story from Bandit Lites in Nashville. With the huge kick to “Go Green”, Bandit Lites has taken it one step further. While most companies are working on ways to develop and manufacturer low energy usage lighting fixtures, Bandit Lites is re-thinking their entire operation, starting with the logo."
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5 comments:
First of all, this article is full of unforgivable spelling and grammar mistakes, but let's set that aside. I can appreciate the author's comment about how Bandit is attempting to get greener in its internal operations, but a new logo and website are not huge changes. If anything, they're going to have to print more letterhead with the new logo on it to replace the old stuff! As far as the GRN-Lites, it's a nice product line, but it hasn't stopped Bandit from selling traditional lights alongside the new pretty ones, and the LEDs probably do cost more than the traditionals (though the rather undeveloped website has nothing to say about the pricing of the new lights, only offering the user's manuals on the page). Overall, not such an exciting news announcement.
I disagree with Brian. I think in this world, companies do the minimum to say they are green. They do a little bit, or just enough to get by. Here, we have a company that is really making the effort, and yes, they are not perfect with their new website, but at least they are really trying. One must also remember that for all the good they are doing, it will be worthless if they go out of business. Therefore, if continuing to sell their old non green products is what affords them the opportunity to sell some green products too, I would like to continue seeing them take part in that type of practice.
While it occasionally seems that all a company need to do to seem as though their going green these days is turn the logo green (I'm talking to you NBC), it's nice to see an entertainment gear manufacturing company at least seeming to make an honest attempt at going green. It does not change the fact that I had never hear of Bandit Lites until this article, but maybe there's a wave of green theater coming that Bandit Lites will ride with grace. The important part is that Bandit Lites seems to be trying to help companies as a whole go green having to make only minor changes, which might not be a bad thing since some green practices can actually safe a fair amount of money on some of the theater necessities.
Time to get back in my critic's corner:
Changing the color of the logo and website is not a change at all. That's marketing. You'd think writers in the field would be more conscious of this, but we've seen before how much iSquint is into good marketing. I guess that's why there's still an industry for it.
All that aside, "They are also looking at their facilities as well and how to cut down on energy loss and waste as well as cutting back on printed materials and sorting for recycling." is a lot of weasel words to say that as a company, they'd like to be more efficient (that's economically motivated, not environmentally.)
Beyond all this, I'll bring up the point once again that there is no free lunch, and while LED fixtures are good by some benchmarks, we shouldn't blindly trust that they are always the more green option. Yes, they use less energy per leumen - that's a good thing. On the other hand, if you consider a conventional light, it has a few advantages. This issue actually neatly parallels the conventional vs CFL debate ( see http://sound.westhost.com/articles/incandescent.htm .) The circuitry involved in LED fixtures means that when discarded they contain many more heavy metal toxins than a conventional (which at a maximum has a dab of lead solder in the lamp base) and much of the 'lost' energy is useful in large spaces, where rooms are artificially heated anyway. While it's hard to know exactly where manufacturing is done for any given element, it's also common for circuitry to be imported from other countries where workers may not handle that dangerous processes safely, and where industrial chemical runoff is a major issue. I'm not trying to argue that LED's are bad, but I do want to keep us from forgetting that every improvement is a trade off and we shouldn't let manufacturers conceal any downsides to this new technology.
I'm gonna agree with Jon Mark. It's not like a huge change can be made all at once. It takes time to get the ball rolling. Also, it's pretty expensive to make this change. Of course, people are going to want to buy the greener products but, only if the price margins aren't too great.
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