Month: June 2018

I read in the Manufacturers’ Monthly that Lighting Council Australia is relaunching Exit Cycle, a recycling program to improve “the recycling rates of emergency and exit lights.”

This looks like some progress as now at least there’s acknowledgement that a problem exists.

The article states that “there are approximately 30 million emergency and exit lights” in Australia and “the majority of the green-emergency lights we see across all buildings are powered by a combination of older battery technologies, which often use cadmium, nickel metal hydride or sealed lead acid”, (“green-emergency lights” – is that a bit of greenwashing?).

I wonder where all those batteries and the e-waste from failed exit signs are going now?

The obvious solution is to get rid of batteries and e-waste forever by using more photoluminescent exit signs and emergency visibility products.

But then there’s the little issue of all that turnover generated by servicing and replacing 30 million fittings ie don’t kill the goose, we want facility managers to keep laying the golden eggs.

Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying “half the truth is often a great lie”.

I think the “great” referred to the size of the lie rather than the quality but you do see a lot of effort going into constructing a pretty good lie hidden behind a little bit of fact.

The Lighting Cartel in Australasia have been peddling a number of half truths as they battle to retain relevance and their self appointed “gate keeper” position.

Both the Australian and New Zealand building codes have been updated to recognise that traditional electrical emergency lighting and toxic battery back up exit signs are NOT the only one way to provide emergency visibility and identify exits.

Since modernisation of the building codes we have seen propaganda and half truths peddled around the industry inferring that AS 2293 is the only way to provide emergency visibility and exit signage that is compliant with the building codes. Complete RUBBISH!

In my opinion AS 2293 is a standard that is demonstrably flawed and outdated but the incumbent committee, having ruled the roost for so many years, seem to be able to ride roughshod over Standards Australia’s published Standards Guidelines.

I think it’s time we started to call out the half truths.

If there’s interest out there we’ll start a series of brief posts pointing out some of these technical constructs and leave it to you to decide if what’s true and what’s not.

I don’t want to waste my time so hit me with a “like” if you think this is a good idea – or if you’d like to keep it off the grid simply send me an email: td@ecoglo.com