Industry-Wide Luminaire EPDs Are Verified, and Lifetime Reporting Is Next

In an email, Leela Shanker, Sustainability Director- Design Lab at WAP Sustainability, explained, “We are thrilled to announce the Industry Wide Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for all 5 luminaire types (linears, downlights, cylinders, troffers and post tops) have been third party verified and approved for public release.”

EdisonReport received the announcement from Leela to share with the industry.

Industry-wide environmental product declarations (EPDs) for five luminaire types have been third-party verified and approved for public release. The types covered are linears, downlights, cylinders, troffers and post tops.

Five fixture types, one verified set

The EPDs come out of a collaborative LCA Incubator effort, and WAP Sustainability, in announcing the news, credited its life cycle assessment team with bringing the verification process to a close. Specifiers have been asking for the reports, and WAP Sustainability says there is a window to put the EPDs to use right away, including recognizing incubator participants at the IALD Enlighten Americas conference in Austin, TX.

The declarations will be hosted on Environdec and in the IALD’s resources.

Dates to know

The October 6 agenda covers an introduction from Greenlight Alliance and the IALD, a walk-through of the EPD format and key findings, and where the declarations will live. It also introduces a manufacturer and designer survey on what would best help with carbon literacy, demand for the data, and applying it. The IALD plans a further town hall in the coming months to share a formal press release and coordinate a wider industry education campaign.

Other industry milestones

WAP Sustainability points to several developments since its last roundtable:

• The IES released its Sustainability Lighting Practice Guide, LP-10-20.
• LightingEurope released its rules for life cycle assessment of luminaire sources.
• Harmonized rules for luminaire lifetime reporting have been proposed, based on LED modules, drivers and luminaire systems. Feedback on the outline, which was attached to the announcement and is covered in the next section, can go to Jean-Marie Croue, Director General of Syndicat Luminaire, at [email protected].
• A North American product category rule (PCR) based on the international IEC standard has been submitted for peer review.

The next question: what counts as a luminaire’s lifetime?

A draft proposal circulating in the lighting industry argues that it is time to agree on what “lifetime” means for a luminaire. Without a definition, nearly identical products can carry very different environmental claims. It is the outline WAP Sustainability attached to its announcement.

A loophole in the numbers

Lighting Europe has no real definition of luminaire lifetime, only information on the lifetime of the light source and the control gear. Under the PSR 0014 product rules, the assigned lifetime is whatever the manufacturer declares, in hours of operation, under the conditions of use the manufacturer provides. It must be justified in the life cycle assessment (LCA) report.

The proposal says that flexibility creates two problems:

1. A loophole in EPDs. Products that are almost the same can declare very different lifetimes in their environmental product declarations (EPDs).
2. Opposite incentives. EPDs look better when a luminaire has a long lifetime. A company’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions look better when its luminaires have a short one, because Scope 3 under the GHG Protocol counts emissions from the use phase, and the use phase depends on lifetime.

The proposal’s answer is direct: define the lifetime of a luminaire.

What the standards say today

The existing documents leave the number to the manufacturer. Annex B of EN IEC 62722-2-1 gives a lifetime recommendation methodology for LED luminaires, but it provides no values and no lifetime.

PSR 0014 comes closest. It defines the reference service life as the lifetime declared by the manufacturer, in hours of operation, and says it depends essentially on the lifetime of the control gear and the light source. The luminaire lifetime is declared at 25°C ambient unless the manufacturer specifies otherwise. For the luminaire’s structure, PSR 0014 applies a maximum operating lifetime of 100,000 hours unless the manufacturer specifies a lower value.

Which component sets the luminaire’s lifetime depends on what can be replaced:

The proposal: lifetime follows the housing

If the components, such as the light source and driver, are repairable or replaceable, the luminaire’s lifetime should be the lifetime of its housing or enclosure. That lifetime would be set by the type of material and the environment of use.

The draft shows how this would work for three product types, each counting the enclosure only:

Under this approach, a serviceable fixture is credited with the life of the part that cannot be swapped out, rather than a number chosen case by case.

Why the number matters: use-phase emissions

Lifetime is a direct multiplier in the GHG Protocol’s use-phase rule, so whoever sets it moves the total. The proposal lays the calculation out for each luminaire model and each country or area where it is sold:

E_use = Q × L × H × P × M × EF

Here Q is units sold, L is lifetime in years, H is operating hours per year for the main application, P is power in watts, M is the light management coefficient, and EF is the carbon intensity of electricity in that country or area (CO2e per kWh).

H and M come from the PSR tables. Default annual operating hours run from 2,000 for educational buildings to 5,000 for hospitals, hotels and retail, with offices at 2,500. Outdoors, urban applications default to 4,000 hours, and the inside of a tunnel is 8,760, which is every hour of the year. The management coefficient comes from PAS 63627, whose energy gain coefficients reflect the light management functions on the market and include the luminaire’s stand-by consumption.

Worked example: a plastic LED panel in Spain

The draft runs the numbers for a plastic LED panel (IP 20) with presence detection and dimming:

The result is 9.9 million kg of CO2e, or roughly 9,900 metric tons over the product’s assumed life. Change the declared lifetime and that figure moves in proportion, which is the point of the proposal.

What it means for manufacturers and specifiers

The proposal is still a draft, and it would change how lifetime is declared rather than how luminaires are built. But the effects would reach several parts of the industry.

• Manufacturers would no longer choose a lifetime figure freely for serviceable products. The housing material and environment of use would set it.
• Specifiers and designers comparing EPDs would be looking at lifetimes declared on the same basis, not numbers that differ by product for no technical reason.
• Sustainability teams reporting Scope 3 use-phase emissions would work from a fixed lifetime, operating hours and management coefficient instead of a number that can be tuned in either direction.

The proposal ties the definition to repairability: if the light source and driver can be replaced, the fixture is credited with the life of its housing. That gives makers of serviceable luminaires a clear reason to design for it.