We’re asking clients to use renewable energy for our lighting schemes

Thomas Paterson, director of Lux Populi and one of North America’s lighting designers, tells Circular Lighting Report editor Ray Molony about a practice initiative to request clients use renewable energy for the its lighting schemes.

‘We don’t think that we have the power to force clients to do much of anything,’ says Paterson. ‘ But we can bring our ethic without necessarily
putting it up front. We have a great recurrent client base, and what we want to do is move them over time. So we’re starting this year with letters to all our clients on all our projects saying, hey, do you want to work with Lux Populi?

We ASK you to use renewable energy. We ask you to only buy solar or wind or whatever.
‘Next year it becomes a much stronger recommendation. ‘We expect
you to’ is the language we’re sort of working around, but not actually
enforcing it. And the year after it becomes ‘please confirm in writing that you
are’. And the goal was not for us to dictate to our clients how
they operate, how they live their lives, but it’s to build a culture around
this where the expectation becomes normalised.’