Sustainable Product Development

Every item bought or sold comes from raw materials extracted from the Earth; manufacturers turn these materials into products, and eventually, they are discarded as waste. This linear process drains the planet’s finite resources while generating significant waste and emissions.

An alternative model is to become less linear and more circular. This means considering a product’s lifetime and maintainability as well as the possibility to reuse, refurbish or even remanufacture once the product’s initial use comes to an end. This circular approach captures and keeps materials in use at their highest value. This idea has been evolving since the 1980s; it aims to minimise waste and pollution by optimising the value and use of resources.

The linear approach of creation, consumption, and disposal is not sustainable. Circularity is a strategy to increase sustainability, reduce waste and maximise the reuse of materials.

At Dextra Group, we promote continuous improvement throughout the business. We are continuously developing both new and existing products to reduce embodied carbon and improve their efficiency, longevity and ease of repair to further minimise our environmental impact.

The circular economy and the reduction of embodied carbon are key factors in the specification and development of new products and will help shift the industry to more sustainable business practices.

Reducing material content is critical to minimising environmental impact, less material not only reduces embodied carbon but also reduces weight for transportation and the amount of material that must be recycled at end of life. At Dextra we constantly review our designs to reduce material content and wastage wherever possible. Not only do we strive to reduce material weight, but also to ensure that the materials we use contain the lowest possible embodied carbon and where feasible come from sustainable and recycled sources.

To ensure complete transparency and simple comparison we provide TM65 embodied carbon values for every product we manufacture covering nearly 20,000 product variants. This data allows us to ensure that we are constantly reducing our embodied carbon and identify areas where design changes will have the most impact.

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The majority of the carbon produced by a luminaire is typically generated from its lifetime operation rather than the embodied carbon in its construction. This is particularly the case where luminaires are high powered and have long operating hours. We therefore focus on energy efficiency as a key element in reducing lifetime carbon of our products. We only use best in class LEDs providing state of the art efficiency whilst our optical designs are constantly reviewed to ensure that as little light as possible is wasted within the luminaire. With our own independently accredited on site laboratory and two photometers we are able to rapidly test and redesign products entirely in house to ensure that our luminaires are not only as efficient as possible but also to optimise the light distribution to their intended application and ensure that light installations are lit with the minimum number of luminaires and energy consumption.

Alongside using the most efficient source and optical design possible, using controls to ensure that luminaires are dimmed or turned off during periods of absence or in conjunction with natural daylight contributions offers further substantial reductions to carbon. We offer a wide range of controls both standalone and integral to the luminaire including wireless systems that allow luminaire and wall switch grouping and central reporting of luminaire status that can significantly reduce both operating costs and operational carbon.

Longevity is key to reducing embodied carbon. Maximising the product life cycle not only minimises embodied carbon but also further reduces the carbon impact created through installation of replacement luminaires as well as reducing overall lifetime cost for our clients.

We only use state of the art components with 100,000 hour lifetimes and Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries with far longer design life than their nickel metal hydride or nickel cadmium counterparts. Our LEDs offer >100,000 hours of operation to 80% lumen maintenance with excellent colour consistency over life ensuring that the LEDs will last as long as the other key electronics in our products.

Ease of maintenance is also vital to ensure that longevity is maximised. All Dextra luminaires are designed to ensure that key components are easily replaced with commonly available tools, we do not use sealed product designs which must be disposed of at end of life.

Where possible products are designed to incorporate a one piece replaceable tray ensuring that individual components can be replaced on failure and the entire product can be easily upgraded for a second life cycle when maintenance is no longer practical.

Where all avenues of maintenance or upgrade have been exhausted we also ensure that end of life disposal is as simple as possible. We do not use adhesives or permanent bonding to allow different materials to be separated for recycling, we ensure plastics are marked with their polymer logo where practical to do so and we minimise the number of material types in each product design.

These design approaches with a focus on longevity, repair, upgrade and end of life recycling are undertaken in accordance with CIBSE TM66 guidance and all Dextra products are assessed using the TM66 CEAM methodology. We provide CEAM scores for every product range we manufacture ensuring clients have full visibility on the circularity of our products prior to purchase.

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Sustainable Product Development

We have taken great steps towards improving the sustainability of our product ranges:

Continuous improvements & Circular Economy

Packaging at Dextra Group