The Editor,
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the various trends in corporate social responsibility and the schemes to reduce their carbon footprint.
Recently, at a local mall, I discovered that they removed all their recycling and waste bins in favour of employing a recycling team to sort, recycle and dispose of food court items that they state is helping them be better corporate citizens by reducing their carbon footprint.
That’s great, however, they probably can make a greater immediate impact by looking up. The malls lighting system currently has more than 140 1,000-watt high-pressure sodium parking lot lights and more than 50 1,000-watt metal-halide lights operating between 12 and 16 hours per day, which produces an estimated 1.5 tons of CO2 emissions per day at an estimated annual energy and maintenance costs in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to simply replace their lighting with an equivalent LED lighting system, which are proven through studies conducted by the US Department of Energy to reduce both CO2 emissions and lighting costs to around one-third?
The energy savings alone would pay for the costs to replace these energy suckers within a few years.
A few days ago the Climate Group called for all public lighting to be LED by 2025. I think businesses would be wise to follow suit and prioritize the replacement of outdated energy consuming lighting systems to reduce their carbon footprint.
Greg Gillanders,
Coquitlam
