How will sustainability performance affect lighting design practice?

Sustainability in lighting is a topic I have been following with growing interest. At the moment, almost everything in our industry seems to be drowned out by the topic of AI. Does sustainability receive the attention it deserves? In any case, it seems urgent and raises a number of questions for me.

I am not an expert in Life Cycle Assessment, EPDs or embodied carbon. But the more I hear about these topics, the more I wonder how much they will change the way we think about lighting quality and performance.

Beyond energy efficiency

Until recently, sustainability in lighting was often associated mainly with energy efficiency. But the discussion has become much broader. Embodied carbon, materials, lifetime, circularity and the overall environmental impact of lighting installations are opening up new perspectives on how we evaluate sustainability.

For designers to take these aspects into account, they need to be educated. And they need reliable information about the products they specify. And much of this data has to come from manufacturers.

There is already work underway to help produce and assess this information. CIBSE’s TM65.2 and TM66 address different aspects of sustainability, while LightingEurope has worked with PEP ecopassport on common rules for luminaire EPDs, aiming to make environmental data more consistent and comparable.

A timely example is the LCA Incubator’s work with the GreenLight Alliance and IALD. Its industry-wide EPDs for five luminaire types have now been verified and approved for public release. They provide reference points where product-specific data is not available.

Many questions remain for me

When does environmental data actually change which luminaire gets specified? How do designers balance environmental impact with lighting quality? Or do they even need to?

And will sustainability performance eventually become as natural a part of the design workflow as photometric or energy calculations? How would that change the way designers work and advise their clients? And what would they need from their tools?

Learning from the people working on it

If you visited our DIALux Co-Creation Space at Light + Building this year, you may even have dropped into the IALD Discovery Discussion with Leela Shanker about embodied carbon. At Enlighten Americas in Austin, I will join the Sustainability Design Lab facilitated by her and Vicki Rybl. I want to hear what is already changing in practice.

I am curious: What is your perspective on this? How relevant is sustainability performance in your work today, and where do you see this heading?

Connect with me and share your thoughts →

And if you are at Enlighten Americas 2026 in Austin, let’s meet there.