Abstract
The environmental impacts of photoluminescence and light-emitting diode (LED) lighting technologies in horticulture are described in this paper. As a case study, the life cycle assessment (LCA) associated with the raw materials, air, water and natural resources of screw-based compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and screw-based horticultural LED lamps (abbreviated as H-LED) used for “night break” effect in chrysanthemum cultivation is considered. Instead of the unit of radiant power of lighting sources (lumens) used in human lighting, the photon flux (micromoles per second) of the plant light is used in this study. The results of the study show that the environmental impacts of the H-LED lighting technology are markedly less than the fluorescent lamps. Therefore, the shift to LED lighting technology in horticulture in general, and “night break” chrysanthemum cultivation in particular, brings about tremendous benefits not only for saving energy and improving crop quality, but also for protecting the air/climate, water, soil and natural resources.
Highlights
Electric lamps, such as fluorescent lamps, are widely used to supplement sunlight and day-length extension for the production of horticultural crops in greenhouses
Within each of the impact indicators, the values presented are comparable between the different lamp types because the lighting service was normalized to represent 234,000 μmol/s-h for the
For global warming potential (GWP), the compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) had CO2 -equivalent emissions, with 1534 kg of emissions associated with the functional unit of 234,000 μmol/s-h of light
Summary
Electric lamps, such as fluorescent lamps, are widely used to supplement sunlight (supplemental lighting) and day-length extension (photoperiodic lighting) for the production of horticultural crops in greenhouses. To our knowledge, almost all of the previous studies of artificial lights focused only on the evaluation of effectiveness and energy saving of the different kinds of lamps, including horticultural light emitting diode (H-LED) lights used for horticultural applications [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. These studies neglected to examine the influence of artificial lighting sources on the environment associated with four environmental categories: air/climate, water, soil and resources. Life cycle assessment (LCA) was used because it is an approach well-suited for comparing the environmental impacts of the traditional
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