Everlight Light Bulb | Zachary Wegscheid

Responsibilities: Industrial Design | Product Redesign

‍background 📖

Product Redesign

Focusing on the viability of our future planet, I researched the common Sylvania 60 watt LED bulb. I took the fundamentals of current lighting and created a bulb that is not only made out of eco-innovative materials but something that lasts the entire life of the home by only replacing the key elements that produce light: the LED diodes.

The Everlight bulb contributes a total of .55 kg CO(2) eq into the atmosphere compared to the Sylvania bulb emitting a total of 3.56 kg CO(2) eq into the atmosphere!

the problem

Where does your light bulb go at the end of it's life?

There is currently no large-scale system to recycle light bulbs after they are thrown away due to precious metals inside. To supply a household with the average (45) amount of lightbulbs, 160.2 kg CO2 eq is emitted into our atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer, adding to global warming, and several other environmental impacts.

Final design

Introducing the
Everlight Bulb

The Everlight bulb lasts the entire life of the houseland by easily
replacing the LED diodes when they burn out. Often times in LED
bulbs, only one LED will burn out, therefore making the entire bulb
useless. This extends the life and use of the light bulb

The entire bulb would be made out of recycled plastic that has been
melting and formed into the desired shape via Precious Plastics location.
The Everlight would be able to be melted down and or recycled
several times over.

System map thinkning

Looking at the bigger picture

To take the best approach on how tackle this large issue, I mapped out my thinking on every aspect of the light bulb.

Lifecycle Analysis

Focusing in on the lifecycle of the light bulb

I wanted to understand the complete lifecycle of the light bulb and calculate the amount of CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere per one bulb

Design Constraints

I came up with the following conclusions

The socket and size of the bulb needs to be
design to fit current socket standards in homes.

The bulb must have the smallest environmental impact as possible, therefore needing to be made out of materials that can breakdown or recycled easily.

The diffuser dome has to be easily removable so that the user can easily change out the individual diodes.

Design Framework

Finding a design framework to structure the project

Due to the large use of light bulbs, I felt as though it was best to approach the problem in three stages: asses, redesign, and implement.