In 2023, Signify has transformed Dublin Port Tunnel with a LED lighting upgrade kit that delivered significant energy savings, improved visibility, and reduced environmental impact. The project upgraded all 1,800 light points across the 9km tunnel, replacing older high-pressure sodium lighting with energy-efficient LED technology. 

Rather than replacing the entire lighting infrastructure, Signify developed a circular upgrade kit that reused the existing luminaires, reducing material waste and avoiding the need for a costly new installation. This approach saved an estimated €3 million (£2.6 million) in capital costs. 

As an added advantage, the upgrade has also helped reduced electricity consumption by up to 60%, and improved lighting quality for enhanced driver visibility, increasing colour rendering from CRI 25 to CRI 70, while minimising disruption as installation was completed during overnight works. 
The project demonstrates how existing infrastructure can be modernised to support energy efficiency, circularity and sustainability goals.

Commit

Signify circularity is built around three main actions: use less, use longer, and use again. “Use less” focuses on reducing material footprints, increasing recycled content, eliminating harmful substances, and improving energy efficiency. “Use longer” emphasizes extending product life through upgradability, repairability, and maintenance. “Use again” ensures that products are easier to disassemble, harvest for parts, and recycle at the end of their useful life, maximising material reuse and minimizing waste. Circularity forms an important part of our sustainability strategy and going a step further, under Signify Circle, our products are explicitly designed for circularity

Plan

When Signify was approached by tunnel maintenance operator Egis Road and Tunnel Operation Ireland (ERTO), to upgrade the lighting in the tunnel with a goal to be sustainable. For this, the Signify R&D team set out to a find a solution that could help commit to the agenda.

The team went a step further in evaluating how the already installed lights could be reused to save cost in infrastructure, so the project could contribute to a circular economy. The team was hopeful that a solution could be found that would bring all the benefits of modern LED road lighting while giving a new lease of life to the fittings, cabling and infrastructure that was already in place.

Partner

A circular approach begins by asking: what can we keep, upgrade and reuse before replacing?
For Dublin Port Tunnel, the project offered a huge advantage – a circular economy-inspired upgrade kit that would reimagine the materials that were already in place and put them to work in a new way. The Signify team took the existing set-up as a starting point to design a custom LED tray that would fit seamlessly into the Philips WRTL lantern bodies that had been installed 17 years ago and which were still in great shape.

The benefits of this approach were multiple. First, it’s of course a much more economical approach. By making use of materials already there, Signify was able to drastically reduce the costs and pass that on to our customer in a very competitive tender. With the custom inserts, Signify could reuse the original, high-quality housing while retesting and CE marking all of the units to current standards. Through this remanufacturing approach, Signify was able to reduce capital expenses by an estimated €3m (£2.6m) compared to a new installation.

Act

When we think about sustainable projects, we’re often drawn to the new and shiny. But to reach our climate goals and create a liveable future, it can’t always be about new – we also have to think about what we can achieve with what we already have.

At Signify, we offer upgrade kits that form an integral part of any circular project – These kits upgrade existing luminaires housing with the latest LED boards, optics, drivers, and connected lighting options and give these luminaires a second life and future-proof your lighting without replacing entire luminaires – modernising the existing lighting.

In the case of Dublin Port Tunnel, we’ve used this approach to deliver massive energy savings at a greatly reduced cost, with a fraction of the waste, and with minimal downtime- a project that is all about real tangible change.

Share

With a minimal waste approach and by giving existing infrastructure a second life, Dublin Port Tunnel demonstrates how circular inspired upgrade kits can accelerate sustainability while reducing waste.