5 Things to Know:  October 24

As reported by KFDM News, a Beaumont, Texas, viewer has been emailing the station’s Waste Watch team since last year about youth baseball lights burning in daylight and overnight at Jefferson County’s Doggett Ford Park. His evidence included a photo of the fields lit at about 3 p.m. on May 17.

The 12-field complex replaced its original 1,500-watt metal-halide system in 2017 with Ephesus All Field 750 LED fixtures, funded by an energy-efficiency grant. Ephesus was an Eaton brand then. It now sits inside Signify’s Cooper Lighting Solutions.

KFDM put the cost at about six cents an hour per fixture, or $20 to $35 an hour to light all 12 fields at full power. We ran the number the other way. The county auditor pegs the park’s annual electric bill at about $617,500, mostly heating and cooling. One hour of every field lit equals roughly 0.003% to 0.006% of it.

The park says the lights are switched manually. For reps selling sports lighting to counties, the efficiency case was made in 2017; scheduling and automatic shutoff are what keep a 3 p.m. photo off the evening news.

As reported by SFGATE, residents of Lone Pine, California, spent part of the night of October 10 staring at two intensely bright beams pouring down from the slopes near Mount Whitney.

The source was Reflect Orbital, a Los Angeles-area startup that wants to put mirror satellites in orbit and sell reflected sunlight after dark. Its crew set up generator-powered spotlights along Horseshoe Meadows Road to recreate the light spot a satellite would deliver, a company spokesman told SFGATE. Members of the China Lake Mountain Rescue Group ran night searches and stretcher carries under the light. One rescue leader told the San Francisco Chronicle it helped but would not change search and rescue forever.

The Federal Communications Commission authorized the company’s first demonstration satellite, Eärendil-1, in July. Reflect Orbital has outlined plans for up to 50,000 reflectors by 2035. Astronomers and dark-sky advocates raised objections during the FCC review.

Outdoor lighting professionals spend careers aiming light at a target and keeping it off everything else. A source 625 kilometers (388 miles) up, steered at a spot several kilometers wide, is a spill-light question no ordinance was written to answer.

As reported by WFAA, a Southern Dallas group is buying and installing solar-powered streetlights in neighborhoods it says have been left behind.

The October 4 report followed a party where six people were shot. Yafeuh Balogun, a coordinator with Community Movement Builders, told the station residents describe too little funding and infrastructure reaching their blocks, so the group picked something it could build itself.

KERA reported in February that the group installed its first light on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Basswood Street in Highland Hills, digging the hole and pouring the concrete itself, then began crowdfunding more. A city spokesperson told KERA Dallas typically receives a few hundred new streetlight requests a year.

Solar street lighting is already a city program next door; Fort Worth has installed more than 1,000 solar assemblies with federal recovery funds. For lighting people, the Dallas story shows how directly residents connect light with safety, and how quickly they will buy fixtures themselves when the queue stalls. The open question for any off-grid install is who maintains the battery in year five.

As reported by Providence's NBC 10 News, the decorative LED lighting on Rhode Island’s Sakonnet River Bridge is malfunctioning, and the repair runs into a familiar problem.

The system is aging and replacement parts are no longer available, Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority Executive Director Lori Caron Silveira told the station. The lights went in when the Rhode Island Department of Transportation opened the span between Tiverton and Portsmouth in 2012. The authority took over the bridge a year later and uses the lights to mark holidays and recognize nonprofit causes.

The authority has not said who made the system, what failed or when the lights will return. A follow-up report on October 23 said they remain dark while repairs continue.

Fourteen years is young for a bridge and old for LED electronics. For specifiers working on bridges and facades, the lesson is to write spare-parts stock, open control protocols and a defined support period into the spec. The owner keeps the asset long after the product line is discontinued.

The holiday lighting requests will arrive on schedule regardless.

The U.S. Green Building Council has launched TRUE v2, an updated version of its zero waste certification for facilities, construction projects and events. TRUE, short for Total Resource Use and Efficiency, is administered by Green Business Certification Inc. alongside LEED and has been around for about a decade.

The new version rebuilds the scoring around 100 available points, up from 81, adds an optional pre-certification step and moves registration onto GBCI’s Arc platform. Incineration and waste-to-energy still don’t count as diversion. USGBC cited research showing commercial disposal costs up 15% to 30% since 2016. Colgate-Palmolive, the largest corporate user by its own count, has 53 certified projects in 27 countries.

Nothing in the announcement singles out lighting. Still, a fixture retrofit at a certified plant produces the kind of material a zero waste program has to account for: old luminaires, drivers, ballasts and lamps, some of them regulated. Contractors and ESCOs bidding retrofits at certified sites should ask early how removed equipment will be tracked and recycled, and whether it lands in the owner’s diversion numbers.