EGG Lighting's circular approach to maintaining and remanufacturing fittings earned top honours at the Glasgow Business Awards, alongside a Net Zero accolade, as clients report substantial cost and energy savings.

Lighting tends to be replaced the moment it fails, yet that reflex can be expensive, wasteful and often unnecessary. A more effective route starts with a simple challenge: do you actually need new?

That mindset underpins EGG Lighting’s model and helped the Glasgow firm secure two trophies at last year's Glasgow Business Awards: Most Outstanding Business, sponsored by Vita Group, and the Net Zero Achievement award, sponsored by Glasgow City Council.

Founded in 2013 and employing around 30 people, EGG Lighting serves Scottish public sector bodies, housing associations and commercial clients whose estates can run to thousands of fittings. In such portfolios, the gap between "replace everything" and "audit and target" is frequently counted in six figures. The company works to BS 8887-221:2024, the standard that recognises remanufacture as a distinct end-of-life pathway separate from repair or recycling.

-- Advertisement --

"The awards are affirming, but what matters more is seeing clients adopt the model permanently," says Brian O'Reilly, EGG Lighting's founder. "That's when you know the culture is changing."

The results are framed in hard business terms. The Scottish Prison Service has had more than 10,000 fittings remanufactured, saving over £1 million annually in energy and replacement costs. A major energy provider in Aberdeen cut lighting energy use by 44% and saved £207,423 after remanufacturing 2,116 fittings — evidence, the company argues, that the choice between "new and efficient" or "old and wasteful" is often a false one.

For other Glasgow businesses planning their sustainability strategies, O’Reilly’s advice is to start with independent scrutiny rather than assumptions. "The biggest savings we find are rarely about new technology," he says. "They're usually about a client discovering, after an honest look at the numbers, that most of what they'd assumed had reached the end of its life actually hadn't."

EGG Lighting believes its double win recognised precisely this work: helping organisations interrogate what they already own and act only when the data demands it.

Entries for The Glasgow Business Awards 2026 close on 10 July.