Awareness of BSR Municipalities about Sustainable Urban Lighting and Green Public Procurements

Sustainable urban lighting and advances in light emitting diode (LED) technology promise significant cost savings and environmental benefits. For municipalities to tap into benefits of modern technologies, their awareness towards state of the art lighting technology needs to be high. The European Union (EU) has implemented the concept of green public procurements (GPP), which guide public authorities in procurements for reducing environmental impact. This paper describes the development of a questionnaire for assessing awareness about sustainable urban lighting technologies and GPPs. The paper presents results of a survey, carried out using the developed questionnaire, conducted in the scope of the project LUCIA, which is supported by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region (BSR) program. Based on a survey carried out among five municipalities of the BSR, their awareness towards state of the art lighting and control technologies and GPP criteria for streetlights and lighting of recreational areas is assessed. It is concluded that awareness about dimming, control systems, reparability, labelling, ingress protection rating, expected lifetime and warranty is high, while knowledge about supporting technologies, reduction of maintenance costs and energy consumption indicators is poor. Another finding is that public authorities have greater knowledge about street lighting technologies than they do about recreational lighting technologies.