et cetera...: Earth Day is April 22 and we at ETC continue to look at what we can do as a manufacturer to increase our sustainability efforts and decrease our carbon footprint. During CUE 2022, a team from our London office did a deep dive into the data behind our product manufacturing, shipping, and end-of-life practices to bring you a session on sustainable choices around ETC products. Climate change is happening, and we all have to play a part in slowing it down.
5 comments:
I really appreciate the way their process for measuring sustainability was clearly laid out and explained in simple terms that most people would be able to understand. The article does serve as advertising for ETC, as the author includes a section on why you should choose the most high quality products (AKA their products). While it is not necessarily untrue, it is something that you have to take with a grain of salt. Based on the information given, it appears that an S4 tungsten is by far the worst choice when it comes to sustainability; I am not sure whether these lights would still be used by designers to achieve a certain look, or if they are simply left over from a time when we did not have LEDs. The choice to purchase a newer, more efficient light versus keeping an existing light that is less efficient seems like a difficult choice.
While I agree that this is obviously an ad hidden amongst the call for more environmentally friendly lighting, it is worth noting that even overhauling an entire system of fixtures leaves an environmental footprint. While the move towards all LED inventories will have a noticeable impact on the carbon footprints of organizations, handing down all of those old instruments and lamps are better than simply throwing them away. A lot of smaller theatre companies can't afford to upgrade to LEDs or retrofit with things such as the Source4WRD LED base. So for those companies, this older tech is what allows them to barely scrape by. Now, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be attempting to move in the direction of a more environmentally friendly inventory. But the crutch that a lot of spaces rely on as they phase out that older gear is the same gear that they are phasing out.
While I would definitely take the product data with a grain of salt, considering this is an ETC article about light fixtures, I think this post does a great job at showing the steps in the process where carbon emissions can be reduced and increasing the sustainability of these products. Going through the stages, I’m a little confused as to how they described the first stage of manufacturing when it comes to sustainability, because while they do show competitors' fixtures compared to their own, they don’t really expand on the provided data points to show how they’re trying to reduce carbon emissions in this step. I’m very happy about how they are working to use freight methods that produce less CO2 by shipping to distribution sites and diversifying the locations of where fixtures are produced, but I do worry as to how materials shipments to those manufacturing plants will increase carbon emissions. While they discuss how LED’s drive down energy use, they don’t discuss how they’re trying to improve their LED fixtures. Good and informative article, I just always read manufacturer posts with a more critical lens.
Almost clicked off of this because I saw that it was essentially going to be an advertisement, but then I remembered that ETC usually produces quality articles that actually go into detail about what they're trying to push. While I think they could've gone a little more into detail regarding manufacturing on their end, I think that their decision to avoid air freight transportation is pretty respectable, and they make good points about LED lights that, while I'm pretty sure all of us knew, it's still worth stating.
It should be noted as well that despite this being a glorified advertisement, the advice at the end about buying cheap vs buying quality is, and will always be, good advice. I always use the boots example for this: You could buy a cheap pair of boots that will last you 6 months, and keep spending money on new pairs of boots, or you could buy a quality pair that will last you much longer and will cost you overall less than what you'd pay for cheap boots. This doesn't take into account budgeting concerns of course, but as a baseline, it's still good advice.
Sustainability is always a circulating topic of discussion. I’m glad to have come across this article, which was posted on Earth Day to reinforce the statement of environmental protection. I know the shipment is definitely a big factor contributing to the carbon footprint. Considering that ETC has offices and storage units worldwide, it is certainly a huge step towards reducing the carbon footprint produced by transportation. I think it is a more complex issue in terms of using LEDs versus incandescent lamps. I’ve been wondering for quite some time why incandescent lamps are still used rather than replacing them all with LEDs. It seems that LEDs have many more advantages than traditional theatrical lights. Though it did occur to me that LEDs do cost a lot more and as an educational institute, it is hard for us to replace all of our fixtures with newer technology. On top of this, I wonder what can we do as designers to help in making theatrical lighting more sustainable.
Post a Comment