Lawo’s Environmental Policy

A sustainable product line-up and reducing Lawo’s environmental footprint matter to us both as individuals and as an organization. Lawo is currently phasing in the use of recycled materials and the reduction of plastic parts where possible.

Obviously, solar panels installed on Lawo’s buildings are used as an important energy source. But there is a lot more…

Service Life and Flexible Usage

Lawo continually strives to reduce the size, weight and power consumption of its products and solutions. Most Lawo products are designed for a long service life (in excess of seven years), which is supported by the ready availability of spare parts. A second pillar of Lawo’s environmental awareness is to make existing or newly released hardware more agile by decoupling it from the software-based feature set.

While some apps completely redefine the functionality of the FPGA modules inside current Lawo hardware, software-controlled tweaks to the hardware specs, such as the use of BNC connectors for MADI data transfer, are perfectly possible and already available.

A welcome by-product of this strategy is the significant reduction of the number of spare parts and purpose-built components required to service our solutions. New functionality running on FPGA-based hardware reduces the long-term footprint while still providing cutting-edge solutions. Moreover, granular tweaks to the specifications no longer require hardware exchanges.

A flexible licensing system for, e.g., A__UHD Core and Power Core units allows users to grow or shrink the processing power either on a permanent or a timed basis to cope with peak-time requirements. This flexibility ensures the longevity of Lawo hardware investments and thus improves sustainability, with long-term benefits for the environment and our clients’ budgets.

Lawo manufactures its hardware in Germany, in compliance with the European Union’s strict environmental regulations. The entire manufacturing process—from the assembly of raw components to the finished product—takes place in one location. Transport-induced CO2 emissions are totally absent from the various production stages. Lawo furthermore avoids using harmful substances in its products and manufacturing processes—always well within the confines imposed by governmental, institutional and trade bodies. Our wastewater is treated prior to being released to the applicable sewage system. Every bit counts.

Finally, commissioning, configuration, maintenance and service operations are increasingly performed remotely, which further reduces Lawo’s carbon footprint through decreased personnel transportation requirements

Spectacular Space and Weight Reduction

A good example of how Lawo has tackled reduced power consumption needs in our solutions is the replacement of the Nova 73 router with the A__UHD Core. The latter provides vastly increased functionality whilst consuming only 22% of the power needs of its predecessor. Along with a spectacularly compact physical footprint, this benefits both mobile operations and stationary installations. In addition, Lawo offers numerous technology migration paths for its solutions that further extend the lifecycle of its products, e.g., our Audio Production consoles.

The V__matrix platform released in 2016 was Lawo’s first software-defined solution based on our forward-looking FPGA strategy. It allows to reload existing C100 processing blades with new, cutting-edge functionalities as production needs evolve. For instance, processing blades originally purchased for SDI-to-IP conversion can today be used for video up/down/cross conversion, populating multiviewer PiPs, and more.

DEDICATION. INNOVATION. COLLABORATION. TRANSFORMATION. SUCCESS.

Other Considerations

Virtual FAT screen

Major parts of our products are built using aluminum, not just for its outstanding energy balance resulting from material recycling, but also because of its light weight.

Depending on a live production’s scope and the content producer’s infrastructure, large OB trucks can be substituted by distributed datacenters and centralized production facilities. This remote production strategy pioneered by Lawo helps operators reduce the carbon footprint in several ways: less equipment needs to be carried on-site, fewer people need to travel, and, if stationed at a technical hub, the processing equipment can be used almost around the clock for a variety of production workflows.

Even where this is not the case, a compact form factor and a lighter weight of the equipment is appreciated by all stakeholders, and by extension good news for the environment.

Software-based processing (in a public cloud) does not automatically mean a reduction in power consumption. That said, virtualization allows to maximize the use of the computing hardware. Such workflows scale flexibly and adapt to changing requirements in a variety of broadcast production scenarios.

More DSP power that may be required on short notice, for instance, can be supplied by software rather than additional hardware that first needs to be manufactured and shipped to where it is needed.

Lawo’s new IP management platform by the name of HOME makes it easy to leverage processing power irrespective of where it is located, allowing clients to further reduce the hardware that does the computing work, or even to ignore the third-party hardware altogether.

One aspect that appeals to our customer base is that Lawo proposes online webinars and a variety of online training programs, which are not only convenient for trainees on a tight schedule, but further reduce the need for travel.

Remote configuration and acceptance tests not only help Lawo meet its clients’ tight schedules. They also spared the environment from an estimated 90 tons of CO2 during the commissioning and configuration of a green-field broadcast facility in Australia, in 2020. This is just one example where Lawo’s product strategy has allowed its team to provide cutting-edge services while being mindful of the environment.