Although I knew that Currys had a longstanding relationship with Whitecroft, I wasn’t aware of how much Whitecroft had evolved its approach to lighting circularity.
Whitecroft’s focus on waste minimisation through design and reusing existing materials and infrastructure really resonated with our Director of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG), and we engaged it to retrofit the lighting in 77 stores across the UK.
Currys was keen to make progress in this area, and as the project evolved, working with Whitecroft Lighting became something of a circularity learning exercise for the Currys’ FM team.
We were initially impressed with the upfront and longer-term material and labour cost benefits of Vitality Relight, but we didn’t fully appreciate the carbon-saving value until we worked on the product.
In short, our new lighting produced vastly reduced waste as Whitecroft used all the existing suspension gripples and the metalwork behind them, so there was a fraction of the waste from future lighting upgrades.
Reducing operational costs
In terms of operational cost and carbon efficiency, upgrading our lighting to the latest LEDs was an easy decision, particularly with the cost of energy being so high.
The sharp rise in energy costs has presented FMs with an obvious business case for lighting energy efficiency, as the quickening returns on investment are suddenly very attractive.
Some projects, that had previously been unable to proceed, now became viable, particularly in some of the less obvious areas of Currys’ estate, such as back-of-house lighting, or car park lighting, where the return on investment used to be lower.
The change to LEDs is also being driven by new standards that will ban certain fluorescent lighting. Changing legislation is clearly an effective way of accelerating change and it has certainly sharpened Curry's focus on how we can remove and replace certain types of lighting products from our estate.
A new perspective
Working with Whitecroft Lighting and experiencing Vitality Relight has offered a valuable new perspective on waste reduction, which has changed the way FM at Currys are working with suppliers.
It posed new questions about what we should be aspiring to, not just across lighting, but some of our other assets as well – and it has helped us refocus aspects of our tenders.
Once Whitecroft presented the details of the fitting process, it brought the theory of Vitality Relight to life.
We then understood the ongoing benefits of sustainable materials because we could assess that the light fittings taken away will never need to be replaced in their entirety again.
Any future lighting refit will require a fraction of the materials because our investment in Whitecroft’s circular-designed products means only the luminaire will need to be swapped out and none of the fitting itself behind it.
Data: measure and share
We underestimated these long-term positive benefits until we reviewed the nuts and bolts of a physical install – and we can now see the huge reduction in waste and the impact of this on the future.
While we won’t be able to measure the full benefits of Vitality Relight, until the next lighting upgrade, we will track and report the amount of waste we have produced now and at that point in time.
All 77 stores have now been retrofitted, and we are now undertaking our reporting, playing back our data, and sharing what has been learnt and achieved so far with the wider business.
This will include sharing good practices with procurement and making sure that we continue to replicate the carbon-saving successes of this project in future work.
Tom Gardener is the Facilities Management Manager
at Currys PLC
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