Rethinking LED Replacement: What 50 Circular Lighting Projects Reveal About Cost and Value

Published October 30, 2026

Lighting has been one of the quiet success stories of the energy transition. LEDs, a niche technology in the early 2000s, are now installed in an estimated 70% of buildings worldwide, and they can deliver the same light with up to ten times less electricity. In the United States alone, modeling attributes about 185 billion kWh of annual electricity savings and more than US$20 billion in avoided energy costs to LED adoption.

That first wave is now giving way to a second. Early-generation LEDs are approaching the end of their useful lives, and the Minamata Convention on Mercury is phasing out fluorescent lamps generally by 2027, leaving facility owners with large numbers of fittings to make decisions about. A new report from Academics for Circular Economy and the University of Oxford’s Circular Economy and Sustainability Lab, funded by lighting manufacturer Signify, argues that this decision deserves more than a default replacement order. Drawing on 50 business cases, the authors make the case that repairing, retrofitting and reusing lighting assets can cut costs, reduce disruption and conserve materials, provided the choice rests on a clear view of what is already installed.

From Energy Efficiency to Resource Efficiency

As LEDs push operating energy down, the materials inside lighting systems account for a growing share of their environmental footprint. In the life-cycle assessment cited by the report, operational energy still represents about 96% of a luminaire’s fossil global-warming potential, but each further efficiency gain makes production and end-of-use impacts more visible.

A luminaire is more than a light source. It combines a driver, circuit boards, optics, heat sinks, housing, wiring, controls and mounting hardware, each with a different lifespan and recovery potential. The material picture breaks down into three groups:

Bulk metals: In one 23.58 kg modular office fixture, aluminum, steel and copper made up about 89% of the mass and associated embodied carbon, with aluminum alone responsible for 71% of cradle-to-gate emissions.
Critical materials: Gallium in LED semiconductor layers and rare earths such as yttrium and cerium in phosphors appear in tiny quantities but depend on concentrated supply chains.
Batteries: Emergency and off-grid systems add lithium, cobalt, nickel or lead, which need separate collection and treatment.

Regulation is following this shift. The EU Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation can introduce requirements on component replaceability and recyclability, and Digital Product Passports are expected to record product materials and histories. Lighting-specific rules under that regulation are not expected until after 2029, and their final scope remains uncertain.

What 50 Lighting Projects Show About Costs

The report reviewed 50 publicly documented projects across sectors including hospitals, schools, offices, airports, ports and street lighting. Circular approaches most often paid off through lower costs and longer asset life. The reported benefits were distributed as follows:

Capital, maintenance or financing benefits: 37 of 50 cases
Useful life and lifetime support: 31 cases
Assets and materials retained or reduced: 26 cases
Disruption avoided or operational continuity supported: 23 cases
Full replacement avoided: 20 cases
Product-related carbon benefits discussed: 8 cases

Individual projects show the range of outcomes. St Olav’s hospital kept 860 existing housings in service. At London’s Shell Centre, reuse avoided producing 38.4 metric tons of steel, according to the supplier. For BlackRock, the supplier estimates £122,400 in maintenance savings over five years, while Signify estimates €3 million in capital savings at the Dublin Port Tunnel.

Two caveats matter when reading these figures. Several are supplier or manufacturer estimates rather than independently verified results, and the cases are publicly available examples rather than a random sample. With only 8 of the 50 cases addressing carbon at all, the climate benefit of circular lighting remains thinly documented at the project level.

How to Decide Between Repair, Retrofit and Replacement

The report proposes a ten-step framework built on three priorities: clarify existing assets, define lighting needs and demand, and choose tailored circular solutions. Renovation projects start with an inventory of luminaires, drivers, controls, wiring and supporting assets, recording age, condition, energy use and maintenance history for each.

A rule of thumb the authors call the circular compass then matches each asset to an intervention:

Good condition and meets requirements: keep and maintain
Good condition but falls short of requirements: retrofit, upgrade or reuse elsewhere
Partly degraded: repair or refurbish, or remanufacture if the housing is reusable
End of life or obsolete: replace with a circular-ready product, and recycle the old one

The authors also argue that conventional payback calculations understate circular options because they count only energy savings. Their revised approach divides net project cost, after accounting for retained assets and avoided removal, disposal and disruption costs, by annual energy savings plus annual maintenance savings. Ownership is a further variable: Lighting as a Service can suit organizations with limited capital or maintenance capacity, while retrofit tends to favor those with sound housings and in-house teams.

These comparisons depend on reliable asset and utility data. AI-powered retrofit analysis tools such as EnergyPilot AI can help model LED and controls retrofit scenarios against full replacement before capital is committed, turning the framework into site-specific numbers.

Conclusion

The next round of LED investment will shape building lighting systems for years to come. The report’s central point is not that replacement is wrong, but that it should be one option among several rather than the automatic starting point. Retaining an asset only makes sense while it remains the best whole-life choice, and in some cases a new, more adaptable system will deliver more value than extending an unsuitable one.

For facility managers, the practical shift is to evaluate lighting the same way as any other building retrofit: start with what is installed, define what each space actually needs, and compare options on energy, maintenance, disruption, materials and total cost. Organizations that bring this data-driven approach to their lighting portfolios stand to lower costs and reduce exposure to volatile material markets, while preparing for regulation that is steadily moving from energy use toward the full product lifecycle.