Most people are familiar with the acronym NIMBY, or the phrase Not In My Back Yard. Usually it refers to something people feel they desperately need, but don’t want to live near.

It could be a major shopping center. Yes, it would be great to have your favorite retailers close to home rather than having to drive 15 miles to get to them. But you don’t want it within walking distance, because then you’d have to deal with the noise, the traffic and everything else that goes with it.

The same goes for landfills and power plants. You’re glad your favorite appliances have power and that your garbage has somewhere to go, but you don’t want the facility that generates the power or your garbage’s new home to be visible from your back door. Yet at some point, if we don’t change our ways, that’s exactly what could happen.

One way you can protect your personal back yard is by specifying LED lighting instead of High Intensity Discharge (HID) fixtures in any lighting projects. And the beauty is, making that move not only reduces waste and potential environmental hazards – it helps you save money. Here’s how.

Typical well maintained parking structures that operate 24 hours per day, 7 days a week with metal halide technology will be scheduled for group re-lamping approximately every 9 months. Which means a parking structure with 1,000 lamps will potentially add 1,000 lamps (bonus: which contain mercury!) to the waste stream every 9 months. Those lamps take up real estate, and as Will Rogers said, they’re not making any more of that.

So sooner or later, the disposal company has to build a new landfill – maybe next to you. If that’s not bad enough, as much as we’d like to believe that all lamps containing mercury ranging from the 1,000 HID lamps in our example above to the CFL lamps the neighbor down the street is using in their home will end up being properly recycled, sadly we know that this won’t always be the case. So as disturbing a sight that new landfill might be, what could be even more disturbing is the potential mercury that is being released from the improperly disposed lamps you can’t see.

Contrast this with an LED solution. LEDs contain no mercury. In addition, LED solutions can be designed to provide near maintenance-free service for more than a decade, even in our 24/7 parking structure example. Over a ten year period the owners of that 1,000 HID lamp parking structure will need to determine how to safely dispose of more than 12,000 lamps that a properly designed LED solution could avoid altogether. But there’s more to it than that. The materials used in BetaLED® luminaires are also RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) compliant, which means dangerous substances commonly used in electrical and electronics appliances are also avoided. In addition, BetaLED products are highly recyclable making it much less likely that they’ll see the landfill. Instead, they end up in other products – perhaps even in new LED luminaires. Ah, the circle of life.

Finally, we know LEDs can save significant energy consumption. But when coupled with adaptive control systems that can range from a simple occupancy sensor to a complex network based system, LED luminaires can save even more energy consumption. Let’s look at our parking garage again. There are probably large blocks of times when certain areas are vacant. Keeping the lights operating at a level that always assumes occupancy is just wasting energy and money. But with LED products that utilize adaptive controls you can significantly reduce energy consumption even further during periods of inactivity and instantly increase light levels as spaces become occupied. Not only does that reduce energy cost – it also can extend the longevity of an LED system as well.

The best way to make NIMBY work is to avoid the need in the first place. How could you use LED luminaires to keep your back yard landfill- and power plant-free?