Good lighting and hospitality go hand in hand. Hotels must spend much time and money on good lighting design to achieve guest comfort and satisfaction. While lighting yields positive results, it also comes with hefty environmental costs. Sustainable lighting is not just a fad anymore but a core part of any modern business.

This article covers the importance of sustainable lighting solutions and the approach hotels can take toward sustainability.

How Traditional Lighting is Destroying the Planet

Traditional lighting solutions run hot, die quickly, and are a hassle to recycle. Whatever cost benefits they provide are immediately overshadowed by their maintenance/replacement costs.

Over 90% of the energy provided by traditional lighting solutions like incandescent bulbs turns into waste heat. The hospitality industry generally uses a lot of energy to light their building’s interior.

This means hotel owners indirectly heat their buildings using older lighting technology. This might be fine for cold winter days, but the hotels waste even more energy in summer through their cooling systems.

Traditional light bulbs are inefficient and fragile due to their reliance on vacuum-sealed glass enclosures. Most incandescent or halogen bulbs need to be replaced after less than a year of use.

A typical hotel with 100 rooms is expected to deploy over 1000 light bulbs. Thus, every year, those bulbs are replaced with new ones, throwing old ones in the landfill. Traditional lighting is destroying our planet through excess heat generation and material waste.

Traditionally, lighting is so devastating that as of April 2023, the US Department of Energy has committed to phasing out inefficient light bulbs. The move will push US citizens to adopt CFLs and LEDs and is expected to result in $3 billion in annual savings on nationwide utility bills.