Tag: led

Serving It Up Green

  • The Duluth Grill is a family-style restaurant that's finding ways to cut down on trash, reduce energy use, and encourage volunteering in the community. The hanging lamps use LED bulbs, for a dramatic reduction in electricity use. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Some big corporations and some small businesses are taking a serious look at their impact on the environment. Some are using a science-based framework called the Natural Step to try to operate more sustainably. Stephanie Hemphill visited one, and has this report:

Transcript

Some big corporations and some small businesses are taking a serious look at their impact on the environment. Some are using a science-based framework called the Natural Step to try to operate more sustainably. Stephanie Hemphill visited one, and has this report:

The Duluth Grill is a family restaurant. Tom Hanson is the owner here. He says things started changing for the restaurant when he decided he should be offering healthier foods. He says too many of us are gaining too much weight. So he changed the menu, and now he says people can still go out and have a good time without it all going to their waist.

“Whether it’s French fries or fruit or healthy home-made soups, people can be socially engaged eating out but you’re not necessarily sacrificing your eating habits or eating styles.”

His menu offers healthy ethnic meals, gluten-free foods, and teas that claim health benefits.

Once Hanson started thinking about the health and well-being of his customers, he started thinking about the other impacts of his business. He joined a group of about a dozen businesses recruited by a local non-profit to try out the Natural Step approach to sustainability. The Natural Step was developed in Sweden, but it’s being used all over the world.

Restaurant staffers attended training sessions on how ecosystems work, and on what it means to be sustainable.

Manager Jeff Petcoff shows off the new LED lights in the restaurant.


“They produce 12 watts of energy versus 320 watts from the regular light bulbs that we were using prior to this. It’s a little more intimate with dining at night, but we’ve had a positive reaction to that as well.”

The Natural Step program encourages reducing the use of fossil fuels and other resources that have to be mined from the earth. And it calls for not throwing as much garbage into the earth.


In the kitchen, workers separate the trash. There’s a bin for recyclables, one for trash, and one for food scraps. Petcoff says the food waste goes for compost.

“We’ve just made it very easy for our staff to be able to compost and recycle with the bins all over the restaurant.”

The Duluth Grill has reduced its weekly trash pickup, and saved a bunch of money in the process. Owner Tom Hanson says saving money is nice, but part of the Natural Step program calls for not degrading the earth, like by building landfills.

“We don’t live next door to landfill but somebody does, and once you become aware of it, I think, it becomes more compelling to do it.”

And the restaurant encourages its customers to get involved in helping each other. Next to the front door there’s a bin where people can dump their old magazines. A local youth center is recycling them to raise money.

And there’s a bookshelf where people can leave children’s books; it’s part of a community-wide literacy campaign.

One Natural Step principle is about people: a sustainable business operator makes sure the people who work there, and even the suppliers and customers, anyone who has contact with the business, can meet their needs without a big struggle.

Tom Hanson dreams of offering health coverage to all his staff — and maybe someday even child care.

“You could easily consider day care for your staff as being an expense that no small operator could afford. But when you make change little by little, that step could very well enter into our values, and once it becomes one of our values it becomes affordable.”

Many businesses are making these kinds of changes and you might not even be aware of it. But Tom Hanson would say if you’re not sure, ask. You might prompt someone else to do better.


For the Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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A New Bulb on the Block

  • imothy D. Sands, at left, director of Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center in Discovery Park, and graduate student Mark Oliver, operate a "reactor" in work aimed at perfecting solid-state lighting, a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted. Purdue researchers have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of the lighting technology, called light-emitting diodes. (Photo by David Umberger, courtesy of Purdue News Service)

Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:

Transcript

Unless you like to live by candlelight,
you have to buy lightbulbs. But the options
out there aren’t that great. Jessi Ziegler reports how all that might change soon:

Plain-old incandescent lightbulbs are not efficient. That’s
old news.

And fluorescents? The color is funny and they have toxic
mercury in them.

So, what option is left?

LED lights. They’re as efficient as compact flourescents
minus the mercury.

The problem? They’re one-hundred-dollars-a-bulb
expensive.

But scientists at Purdue have been working on a way to
cut that cost.

Researcher Timothy Sands says in about 5 years, LEDs could
cost the same as the other bulbs.

“So, the nice thing about it is you can save energy, and
actually save money over the long haul – even though the
initial cost is very high right now, without changing what
you’re used to, or without lowering your standards for
lighting.”

And Sands says another big advantage of LEDs is you’d only
have to change the bulbs every 15 years.

For The Environment Report, this is Jessi Ziegler.

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The Dark Side of Bright Lights

  • Most of us are using 125-year-old technology to light our homes. 95-percent of the energy used by a light bulb is heat. Only five-percent actually is used to produce light. (Photo courtesy of the National Museum of American History, gift of the Department of Engineering, Princeton University, 1961)

Many of us say we want to be good environmentalists. But we often make choices based on other desires. One of those choices is lighting. Most of us use lights that are very inefficient… and the trend in home lighting is moving toward using more energy… not less. As part of the series, “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a look at light bulbs… and starts at the beginning:

Transcript

Many of us say we want to be good environmentalists. But we often make choices based on other desires. One of those choices is lighting. Most of us use lights that are very inefficient, and the trend in home lighting is moving toward using more energy, not less. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham takes a look at light bulbs and starts at the beginning:


We’re getting a behind the scenes look at a pretty significant historical artifact. Marc Gruether is pulling back a plastic tarpaulin that covers a row of file cabinets.


Gruether: “We are in one of the storage areas in the Henry Ford Museum. And drawer eleven has this light bulb in it which I will very carefully remove. It’s certainly one of the oldest Edison light bulbs that’s in existence. This is one of the lamps that was used in the December 1879 demonstration at Menlo Park.”


Graham: “Now, looking at it, I can see that it’s got that kind of bulbous shape, I can see the filament, I mean, I would recognize this easily as a light bulb.”


Gruether: ““Absolutely. It’s a recognizable light bulb. You’re exactly right. That all looks forward to the kind of lamp forms that became common and that we’d recognize today.”


And that’s not all that’s the same. Just like the first light bulbs, the incandescent bulbs most of us use in our homes today, waste energy. 95% of the energy used is expended in heat. Only five-percent actually makes light. That means everytime you switch on the light – if it’s an incadescent bulb – you’re wasting 95% of the electricity your paying for. In our homes, not much has changed in the last hundred years or so. But in commercial buildings, things have changed a lot.


Commercial builders and industrial architects learned a long time ago that energy efficiency is important. Most of the new office building and factories built today use passive sunlight and high-efficiency lighting that not only saves energy but uses the right spectrum of light to get the best output from their employees.


Moji Navvab teaches about light in architecture at the University of Michigan. He says you can learn a lot about good energy efficient light too. He says with the wide variety of fluorescent, LED, and spot lighting, you can get the right kind of light for whatever you’re doing and use a lot less electricity compared to a house lit only by traditional incandescent bulbs. It’s about using the right light for the right place. Navvab says, really, it’s pretty simple and you can get a lot of information about proper lighting on the Internet.


“If you really are focusing on healthy lighting or you want to save energy, if you go search on the web right away, you can get the information and then you can go to your local stores and they can match it for you.”


But at the local store, most of the time buyers are not very well-informed at all.


Beverly Slack is a salesperson at Kendall Lighting in Okemos, Michigan. She says unless they ask, she doesn’t push energy efficient lighting. And when she does mention fluorescent lighting, which uses about one-fourth the energy that incadescent bulbs use, customers grimace.


“Right. But, they don’t realize the difference in the fluorescent lamps, how they’ve changed, how the different colors have changed in the fluorescents. They’re still thinking of the old standard cool white so, people don’t want them because of that fact.”


Slack says what customers really want is dramatic lighting, and lots of it. They want trendy, recessed lights and track lights that often use extremely hot burning bulbs in a way that’s interesting, but not often very useful.


“They want decorative, decorative, decorative. I mean, it’s amazing. Because I can just see their light bills going sky high.”


Slack says the trend in home lighting in recent years has been just the opposite of commercial lighting. At home, people are using more light, more fixtures, and less energy efficient bulbs. With the trend in new houses being larger, requiring more lights, and homeowners wanting decorative lighting to show off their big new houses, conservation at home is often just being ignored.


It’s no longer about turning off the light when you leave the room, it’s about lighting up the showplace. And as long as the power bill is lower than the mortgage, it’ll probably stay that way.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

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