Sustainability
An honest account of where we are
What We Do · What We're Working On · What We Haven't Solved
Sustainability without marketing language
Most lighting brands have a sustainability page. Most of those pages, including ours in earlier drafts, made claims we couldn't fully back up. So we rewrote this one.
What follows is an honest description of the environmental and social practices we actually follow today, the areas where we're still learning, and a few common claims we've decided not to make. If something here is more modest than what you've read elsewhere, that's deliberate. We'd rather under-promise and earn trust than overstate and lose it.
"Better fixtures last longer. Longer-lasting fixtures need to be replaced less often. Less replacement is most of what sustainability looks like in our category."
How we think about impact
We organize our environmental and social work around three pillars. They aren't original — most thoughtful makers come to similar groupings — but they help us prioritize and measure.
Make less, make it last
The single most environmentally significant decision in our category is how long a fixture stays in service. A piece that's still in use after 30 years has a small footprint. A piece replaced every 5 years has a large one — regardless of how it was made. Our work begins with durability.
Source & ship considerately
Materials, packaging, freight — the sourcing decisions we make have measurable consequences. We work toward materials with longer lifespans, packaging with less plastic, and freight choices that reduce per-fixture transit impact wherever the trade-off is reasonable.
Treat people well
Sustainability isn't only environmental. The workshops we partner with — and the people who work in them — are part of how a fixture comes into the world. Fair pay, safe conditions, and long-term relationships with our suppliers matter to us.
Where we actually are
An attempt at being precise about three categories: things we already do, things we're actively working on, and things we haven't figured out yet (or have decided aren't right for us).
- LED-compatible wiring on all new fixtures (40–80% lower energy use than incandescent)
- Solid metal hardware (brass, steel) over plastic in primary structural components
- Repairable construction — sockets, wiring, and switches replaceable as service items
- Recyclable packaging — corrugated cardboard, paper inserts, no foam where avoidable
- Single-shipment fulfillment for bulk orders to reduce per-fixture freight emissions
- Long-term relationships with workshops with verified fair-labor practices
- Fully foam-free packaging for fragile crystal and glass — currently transitioning to molded paper pulp inserts
- Recycled-brass content disclosure on the spec sheet of every metal fixture
- A repair & refinish service for older Liora pieces returning for restoration rather than replacement
- Shipping carbon labeling at checkout — letting you see and offset the freight footprint of your order
- Annual third-party supplier audit for the workshops we order from most frequently
- An end-of-life take-back program for retired fixtures — early concept stage
- We are not B-Corp certified, and we are not currently pursuing certification — we're focused on practice over credential
- We are not carbon-neutral as a company — we don't believe purchased offsets meaningfully change that for now
- We do not yet publish a full life-cycle assessment for our fixtures — the data isn't reliable enough at our scale
- We do not claim "100% sustainable" or "zero-waste" status — those phrases overstate what's true in our category
- We have not solved international air freight — its emissions remain significant for time-sensitive orders
- We don't tie product choices to cause-marketing campaigns — those efforts haven't met our bar for clarity
Six things we actually do
A closer look at the practices summarized above — what they mean in concrete terms, and the trade-offs each one involves.
Designing for repair, not replacement
Our fixtures are built so that the parts most likely to fail can be replaced rather than requiring the whole piece to be discarded. Sockets, wiring harnesses, switches, and dimmers are standard components that any qualified electrician can swap. We stock service parts for in-collection fixtures and offer them at cost.
This is not the cheapest way to engineer a fixture — sealed, glued, single-piece construction is. But it's the way that keeps a 30-year-old chandelier in someone's dining room instead of a landfill.
Brass & steel over plastic
Our primary structural components — arms, frames, canopies, mounting hardware — are solid brass or steel, never plated plastic. This makes our fixtures heavier (and shipping more expensive), but it's the difference between a piece that lasts decades and one that begins to look tired in five years.
Plastic appears in our fixtures only where it must — typically internal wire insulation, certain electrical components, and some packaging — and we work to reduce it further wherever a comparable alternative exists.
Recycled brass & long-life materials
A meaningful share of the brass we use contains recycled content — brass is one of the most efficiently recycled metals in industrial use, and quality is preserved across recycling cycles. We're working toward disclosing the recycled-content percentage on each fixture's spec sheet as our supplier reporting matures.
For materials where recycled content isn't yet practical — hand-blown glass, certain ceramics, lead crystal — we focus on durability and repairability instead of sourcing claims we can't verify.
Cardboard, paper, and less plastic in packaging
Our standard fixtures ship in recyclable corrugated cardboard with paper-based dunnage. We have eliminated plastic clamshell trays, single-use plastic bags around finished fixtures, and most foam padding from our standard packaging.
For fragile glass and crystal pieces, we still use shaped foam inserts where their protective properties exceed paper alternatives — the trade-off here is real, and we're actively testing molded paper-pulp replacements that meet the same drop-test standards.
Long-term workshop relationships
Most of the workshops who make our fixtures have been our partners for five years or more. We pay agreed wholesale prices on time, place orders far enough in advance to allow steady production, and visit in person regularly. We've turned down opportunities to switch to lower-cost suppliers when the new partners couldn't demonstrate the working conditions we expect.
This isn't charity — it's how good fixtures get made consistently. A workshop with stable orders and respected workers produces better work than one operating on thin margins and high turnover.
LED-compatible wiring & energy-efficient design
Every fixture in our current collection is fully LED-compatible — and a growing number ship with integrated LED arrays designed to last 25,000+ hours. LED bulbs draw 75–80% less energy than incandescent equivalents and last roughly 25 times longer. For most of our customers, this is the single largest in-home environmental decision a fixture enables.
We've avoided integrated proprietary LED systems in some pieces because non-replaceable LEDs can shorten a fixture's serviceable life. Where we do use integrated LED, the modules are designed for replaceability through our service program.
What we won't claim
A short list of phrases you won't find on this site, and why.
About this page
The practices described on this page reflect our current operations as of the most recent revision date. Sustainability disclosures evolve as our supply chain, packaging, and energy choices change — we update this page when those changes are stable enough to commit to in writing.
Where we describe percentages or measurements, the figures reflect our internal estimates based on supplier reporting and operational data, not third-party audited claims unless explicitly noted. We're working toward more rigorous external verification as our scale and supplier reporting allow.
If you spot something on this page that seems inaccurate, overstated, or unclear, please email us. We'd rather be corrected than caught.
Questions about a specific practice?
We're happy to discuss the details
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