| Topic: | LED Street Lights Update & Research | |
| Posted by: | Russell Pearson | |
| Date/Time: | 25/08/14 11:58:00 |
| I'm off to see London Borough of Hounslow again next week where they're going to show me some ideas for reducing the light pollution, light trespass and glare for part of St Mary's Grove. Some lights have been replaced along the road already but information on why is obscure – seems that either other people have been more successful in their complaints, or that they new lights developed faults and they had to use older stock to replace them. Both scenarios raise more questions. I’ve submitted 2 Freedom of Information requests but not had full replies. Cllr Theo Dennison has kindly agreed to look into this for me. One request was on due diligence re the local ecology, esp bats which are protected by law. LBH seem to be of the opinion that bats prefer LEDs, a fact contradicted by all the current research on the topic, including some done locally at Richmond. I hope that the next study isn't one in Hounslow charting their decline. On the human health research front, one of the most recent UK study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology by a research team based at Institute of Cancer Research in London and Oxford University of 120,000 British women found that the more artificial light at night, (LAN) the fatter they became. “The odds of obesity, measured using body mass index, waist:hip ratio, waist:height ratio, and waist circumference, increased with increasing levels of LAN exposure (P < 0.001), even after adjustment for potential confounders such as sleep duration, alcohol intake, physical activity, and current smoking. We found a significant association between LAN exposure and obesity which was not explained by potential confounders we could measure.” http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/29/aje.kwu117 They can’t rule out confounders, but the plot thickens. Now we know that separating this out to light from within the home (TVs, tablets, smartphones and internal lighting) and to external lighting such as our streetlights is not easy. The data nonetheless increases that artificial light at night from whatever source is most probably not good for us and that light of the blue spectrum at night, is especially not good for us. Some people cited by the researcher and author on light at night Paul Bogard are likening this back to the research in the 1950s on smoking: http://www.salon.com/2014/08/09/bring_back_the_dark_how_our_overuse_of_artificial_light_is_changing_nighttime_for_the_worse/ Now it could be said if that’s the case, that the blue-rich lights being installed across Hounslow are the Capstan Full Strength of street lighting... Of course, these concerns may all be unfounded. But there’s now enough concern about damage to human health and the ecology for some more major research to take place. The biggest is happening in Germany at Leipzig and Berlin universities. Here’s a flyer on what they’re looking at: http://www.verlustdernacht.de/tl_files/VDN/_ueber_uns/2_pdf_dokumente/VerlustderNachtFlyer_engl_2011.pdf http://www.verlustdernacht.de/about-us.html This project is of particular interest in that the focus is on the night sky - external light pollution and will look at the impact on wildlife and ecology as well as human health. |