Nancy Wahl-Scheurich with the HerronLED and components

Nancy Wahl-Scheurich is the Co-Founder of Little Footprint Lighting, a lighting company that will launch its first product: the HeronLED Personal Task Light in the next few weeks. I caught up with Nancy at Greenbuild a few weeks ago to talk about this well-designed, low energy lamp.

The Design: As I’ve always said, it doesn’t matter how eco-friendly, green, low-impact, whatever you want to call it, a product is, if it’s not well-designed and appealing to the eye, it’s a wasted product. The HeronLED is in the shape of, you guessed it, the Great Blue Heron. It has a sleek design, and the nice little vents that contribute to its herron-like appearance aren’t just a design feature, they also provide the necessary heat venting for any well-functioning LED lighting system. The individual LED bulb uses 4 Watts of electricity but provides the same amount of light as a 30Watt incandesent bulb.

HerronLED task lamp

Perhaps one of the unique features of this lamp is that in the event that the bulb stops working before the end of its estimated 15 year life span, it is replaceable. One of the issues that Nancy found while working for an architectural LED lighting company, was that in many of the LED task lamps made today, the bulb is integrated into the entire design. If something ever went wrong with the bulb, you have to throw the entire light out, yes, including the lamp! How green is that? So Nancy and her business partner, Cecilia Lobdill, set about making a lamp with replaceable bulbs. It may seem obvious to us, but apparently it isn’t in the LED task lighting industry.

Material Use: Another goal that Nancy and Cecelia had was not just to make a lamp that used a small amount of electricity, but also to ensure that the manufacturing of the product was as low-impact as possible. To this end, the body of the lamp is made from 89% post consumer recycled plastic — and not just any post consumer plastic, but e-waste plastic. Nancy found a company northern California, that recycles e-waste to an extensive degree. Not only does it separate the metal from the plastic, but the company also separates all the different types of plastics that make up electronics into their individual plastics. In the Herron’s case it uses recycled ABS plastic (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the same plastic that is used for Lego building blocks). The plastics recycling company processes the separated ABS plastic into a pellet that consisting of 89% recycled ABS plastic and 11% additives such as colourants. The plastic pellets are shipped down the road to the manufacturing plant in San Leandro, CA. It is uses the pellets in an injection moulding process, assembles the lamp with a steel base, made from 70% recycled steel from an American manufacturer, an LED bulb which contains a CREE chip — a high quality US LED chip manufacturer. Nancy told me that the LED bulb is made in Vermont at a company called LEDdynamics. I confess, I didn’t know there were any LED lighting manfacturers in Vermont.

ABS Plastic pre-shredded (left), medium shred, (right)

ABS Plastic. Left, medium stage. Right in pellet form, ready for injection mould

The point of explaining how these desk lamps are made is to show you how much thought and effort has gone into this product. Little Footprint was out to make a well-designed, affordable, energy efficient, low-impact desk light. They even considered its end-of-life disposal. They’ve accomplished it all the while maintaining manufacturing of it within the US.  To top it all off, the company offers a five year warranty on its product. Oh, and when the lamp has reached its end of life? It can be completely recycled again. Now that’s a perfect example of a “cradle to cradle” product.

Purchase: The lamp will be on the market as of the end of the end of November — early December, 2011. Currently they are taking advance orders and are selling it through their website for the early adopters price of US$145.99. It will regularly sell for US$195.99. The company ships to Canada and the product will carry the ETL/cETL listing mark showing compliance with Canadian and US electrical safety standards.