You are here » Home » Telling Our Story
Snapshot
Public-private partner-ship creates a process that could avoid 11 million tons of CO2 emissions in the next four years.
Addressing Failures of Lighting Market
Photo: David Boughey, TCP, Inc..
Through USAID assistance, a regional organization has been established setting quality standards to dramatically increase regional CFL product quality.
USAID and the world's largest lighting companies have come together to establish a regional system for ensuring that energy-saving lamps meet quality standards
Nearly half of the energy-saving compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) sold in Asia were burning out faster and giving off less light than they should. Since each quality CFL can help reduce nearly 34 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions over its life-time, ensuring the quality of CFLs is critical to addressing cli-mate change. While CFL sales in Asia are rising sharply ($8 billion annually), consumer dissatisfaction with poor quality CFLs is threatening to derail the huge potential for broad adop-tion of these energy-saving lamps.
USAID through the ECO-Asia Clean Development and Climate Program has aggressively promoted the adoption of common standards by CFL manufacturers across Asia and the estab-lishment of a regional organization dedicated to improving the quality of these energy-saving lamps. This effort is helping to ensure Asian consumer confidence by setting quality standards to dramatically increase regional CFL product quality.
As a result of USAID's efforts, the world's largest lighting com-panies and associations from China, India, Indonesia, the Phil-ippines, Thailand, and Vietnam came together to launch the Asia Lighting Council (ALC), an independent organization which promotes and advocates harmonized regional standards backed by a quality certification and labeling system. Funding for the first two years of ALC's core operations is supported by three of the world's largest lighting companies - Philips, General Electric, and Havells-Sylvania.
The objective is to increase the demand in the region for the ALC quality standards while expanding the ALC's income from membership and product certification fees to ensure its long-term sustainability.
ALC-qualified manufacturers currently account for an estimated 30% of the market share of CFLs in Asia, while continuing to grow. Full implementation of the guidelines promoted by the ALC are expected to reduce Asia's carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 11 million metric tons over the next four years, equivalent to taking around 2 million passenger vehicles off the road for a year.
Print-friendly version of this page (533kb - PDF)
Click here for high-res photo
Back to Top ^
|
RSS Feed for Recent Telling Our Story Updates
