Lighting Design and Material Transparency
There’s a connection between construction materials, the environment and human health. In the last several years there’s been a growing wave of practices and standards that have caused the built environment to be healthier and more sustainable. Material transparency is the initiative of the manufacturer to disclose the material ingredients of their products. One way to think about this is as a nutrition label for building products. The same way we read food labels to make decisions about what we put into our bodies, we should be able to make decisions on the materials we put into our built environments. The efficiency of light fixtures has made great strides with LED technology, but to understand the true lifecycle impact, or the embodied carbon of the product, we need to understand the manufacturing process, associated transportation, and installation methods. The first step in understanding the environmental impact of a product is to know what it is made of and how it is made.
The importance of material choices and lifetime impact is well understood in the architecture and lighting design community – end users in retail, biomedical, and academic settings are also requesting this information. The Declare label answers three simple questions: where does the product come from? What is it made of? Where does it go at the end of its usable life? It also provides glanceable information to better understand what Red List materials are present. The Living Building Challenge Red List represents the “worst in class” materials, chemicals, and elements known to pose serious risks to human health and the greater ecosystem that are prevalent in the building products industry.
Our goal is for every one of our products to be Red List free with full material transparency. From the beginning Xico Lighting has had the goal of meeting these strict requirements, from early design we’ve made decisions that have kept certain materials out of our products, and we’ve worked with our suppliers to understand our material choices.
