ABOUT THE LIGHTING ADVOCACY LETTER
The Lighting Advocacy Letter is an initiative by lighting specifiers to accelerate the sustainability of lighting products. Inspired by the AIA Materials Pledge, the letter is intended to inspire a collective dialogue with the lighting manufacturing community about how to align intent and action around a common framework for sustainability. If you are a lighting designer or specifier, signing this letter is your opportunity to publicly commit to making more informed material choices and specification changes and supporting an ongoing dialogue with manufacturers to reduce the impacts of the built environment. Read the letter below.
Q&A + CONNECT: LIGHTING LESSONS + EXPERIENCES
mM is hosting virtual connects every six months for signatories of the Lighting Advocacy Letter, facilitated by the authors of the Lighting Letter. In our next webinar, we’ll be joined by guests from BR+A and Clanton Associates sharing their lessons learned since signing on and implementing the commitments in the lighting advocacy letter.
The next webinar will be held on April 22, 2024
at 2 p.m. PT/4 p.m. CT/5 p.m. ET
LIGHTING Letter Resources:
Explore the *NEW* Lighting Advocacy Toolkit - v2
Have you signed onto the Lighting Letter and want to know what to do next? Pledge organizers have created a Lighting Advocacy Toolkit to help get you up to speed, and get started on your work to drive transparency in the lighting industry.
Updated 4.10.23
Webinar: 10/11/23 Lighting the Way
Join fellow Lighting Advocacy Letter signatories to hear from manufacturers who have made strides toward greater material transparency. Representatives from LightArt, Lightly, and LeGrand will share the steps they took to achieve their sustainability goals, describe the documentation associated with their products, and the process for getting these documents. Designers will leave with information on how to productively engage with manufacturers when requesting increased materials transparency. We are also excited to share Version 3 of the LAL toolkit.
Webinar: 04/11/23 Lighting the Way — Lessons Learned 2.0
Lighting Designers learning + advocating for holistic health in lighting re-convene to share successes, challenges + lessons learned.
Webinar: 10/18/22 Case Studies and Lessons Learned in Transparency
What have we learned 6 months into implementing the Lighting Advocacy Letter? What’s working and what’s not? We held our first Lessons Learned webinar on Oct 18, 2022 to gather input and feedback from the community and inform future iterations of lighting advocacy guidance and toolkits. Missed this webinar? We plan to hold case study webinars and Q&As every 6 months.
Webinar: 3/3/22 Introducing the Lighting Advocacy Letter + Toolkit
Catch up on the conversation! We met in March to introduce the letter, celebrate signatories and dive into what you can do. This was the first of a planned series of webinars that support lighting specifiers in driving change.
July 14, 2021
LIGHTING ADVOCACY LETTER
Dear Lighting Manufacturer,
As members of the lighting specifier community, we are working to accelerate a transformation in the manufacturing industry. Inspired by the 2019 AIA Materials Pledge, we are united across disciplines in a common goal: ensuring that healthy, high performing luminaires become the industry standard. We all want our projects to positively impact human health, the climate, the environment, and society.
As designers and specifiers, we are committed to the five areas of concern in the 2019 AIA Materials Pledge:
Human Health - Preferring products which support and foster life throughout their life cycles and seek to eliminate the use of substances that are hazardous to humans.
Climate Health - Selecting/giving preference to products with lower embodied carbon.
Ecosystem Health - Preferring products which sustain and regenerate the natural air, water, and biological cycles of life through thoughtful supply chain management and restorative company practices.
Social Health and Equity - Preferring products from manufacturers who secure human rights in their operations and supply chains, and which provide positive impacts for their workers and the communities where they operate.
Circular Economy - Preferring products that are designed for long life, with end-of-life solutions in mind and enabling a closed-loop manufacturing cycle.
To address these concerns and meet our goal of transforming the industry, we commit to continuously updating our specifications and sharing best practices, tools, and education to require transparency on material content and optimized luminaires. We further commit to giving priority in our specifications to those products and manufactures that:
Provide publicly available material ingredient disclosure information
Provide publicly available environmental impact disclosure information
Do not stop at material transparency, but strive for optimization
To achieve this goal, we must work together as designers, specifiers, building owners, developers, manufacturers, and contractors to build awareness, share knowledge, drive demand, and deliver solutions. We ask you as responsible manufacturers for your commitment to working towards luminaire industry transformation. To accelerate this mission and to leverage cross-industry insight and expertise, we seek your partnership in advancing this conversation at upcoming industry conferences and tradeshows.
We value our relationship with each of you and understand that the change we seek will not be accomplished overnight. Please join us in continued dialogue and collaboration as we learn from each other and improve our lighting industry together.
Sincerely,
LIGHTING MATERIALS PLEDGE SIGNATORIES
