Danish firm specialises in keeping lights in the ceiling

A family lighting business in Denmark has established a ‘circular business model’ and is now specialising in ‘keeping lights in the ceiling’.

Copenhagen-based Fischer Lighting upgrades luminaires – both its own and rivals – in an effort to prevent waste, and have developed a number of innovations to make it easier to switch a luminaire from traditional technologies to LED.

These include the patented LED ReThinKit, a module the firm has developed for insertion into CFL-based downlights. It allows the customer to switch to ES-based replaceable LED lamps. There’s also a linear version for replacing fluorescent lamps.

‘We see no reason to discard perfectly functional lighting fixtures, if they can be renewed and turned into something even better,’ says the firm.

‘We aim to steer away from the traditional use-and-discard consumer culture which is prevalent in the lighting business. Every year, millions of functional lighting fixtures with outdated electronics are thrown away and end up in trash heaps.

‘This is why we produce modular LED solutions built on existing fixtures, but offering all of the functionality, lighting quality and energy saving technology expected from state-of-the-art LED.’

Fischer Lighting says it has gained a lot of experience from its traditional-to-LED upgrades from its customer base of large Danish companies and public institutions. These include the United Nations, the medical multinational Coloplast and the Technical University of Denmark. It says its upgrades have saved Coloplast, the UN and the DTU 67 per cent, 63 per cent and 69 per cent in annual carbon dioxide emissions compared to the original and outdated technologies. All payback periods are under three years.

‘Before we met Fischer Lighting, our only alternative was new lighting fixtures and we faced a massive investment,’ says Christian Skov Mortensen, the building manager at Coloplast. ‘However, with this solution we were able to keep our beautiful designer fixtures, as they could be rebuilt with LED.

‘The price was a fifth of what new fixtures would cost.’

• Recolight offers special one-day training workshops on ‘Lighting product design for a Circular Economy’. Hosted by industrial designer Simon Fisher of F Mark, the CPD-accredited event explores the design criteria, regulations and standards to help lighting manufacturers apply and demonstrate circular economy principles in product development. More HERE.