Erco’s latest product: honey!

ONE OF the lighting industry’s biggest brands has diversified…into honey.

Leading German manufacturer Erco uses a colony of around 200,000 bees to produce the sweet substance.
It’s packaged in Erco-branded jars with a bee and honeycomb graphic and the words ‘sommarhunig’or summer honey.

The company has had five colonies of Buckfast bees since 2017. They are a species considered particularly hardy and gentle.

Erco says that its colony are ‘an active contribution to nature conservation’ and a counterbalance to concern over bee mortality.

Erco points out that bees are an indispensable part of our ecosystem, and their pollination services ensure the survival of plants, animals and humans.

The colonies are part of the company’s corporate and social responsibility programme.

The company’s ‘Greenology’ strategy for sustainable lighting combines ecological responsibility with technological expertise. It says the our pillars of its strategy are innovation, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability.

‘Our goal is the CO2 neutral production of lighting tools to make light as effective and therefore as sustainable as possible in application,’ it says in it environmental statement.

Other measures include in-house water treatment systems, free-air in production and a huge raft of solar panels on the roof of its factory in Lüdenscheid which generate about 155,000 kWh of electricity annually, which corresponds to about 54 tonnes of CO2.

It is working towards a CO2 neutral factory, although the company hasn’t put a date on this.

Erco has been using 100 per cent certified green electricity since 2022. This means that both production and administration at the site are powered by green renewable electricity sourced from wind and water. This corresponds to an annual saving of around 2,218 tonnes of CO2.
The factory is certified to the Environmental Management System ISO 14001 and the continuous Energy Management System ISO 50001.