A CIBSE Technical Memorandum is tasked with ‘detailing a new technology, or offer a new slant on an established system in a concise and straightforward way’. 

The new technology was the need to redesign products and design new ecosystems of circular economy supporting systems and services. 

To this the Society of Light and Lighting added s strong element of inspiration, the sustainable business case for why you should go circular and the important ingredient of enablement - the detailed advice on how you implement it – which started as a checklist – but grew.

Sustainability questions are complex, so the SLL needed to set them out, make sense of them and prioritise them. 

It needed to scrupulously avoid greenwash and unintended outcomes, so its work grew into metrics, the Circular Economy Assessment Methods – just as EuroNCAP converts the complex subject of car safety into a simple five-star rating.

TM66 – ‘Adopting The Circular Economy in the Lighting Industry’ - provides a background to circular economy principles and sets out the drivers and barriers to its adoption. 

For each profession and sector it details why it is important to them and what the next steps are. Importantly we engaged widely across the industry to ensure it was relevant and practical.

CEAM-Make – This tool is the supply-push tool for manufacturers to complete (or designers if they wish) as it requires in-depth knowledge about products and manufacture. It will be an online/Excel based tool comprised of 66 questions under four tabs - product design, manufacturing, materials and supporting ecosystem. 

Each question is rated and then scored between 1-4, where 1 is status quo and 4 is outstanding. 

At the end of the assessment a total is generated, and a high score indicates a lighting product with good to outstanding Circular Economy credentials.

CEAM-Design – Is the demand-pull tool - its faster to complete, containing only 20 questions relating to the same questions in CEAM-Make.

 It is aimed at lighting designers or specifiers to enable them to quickly understand what level of Circular performance a (not yet tested under CEAM-Make) product or manufacturer has. Again, at the end of the assessment a total is generated.