If you are concerned with the environmental impact of your lighting system, you may want to move towards solar powered lighting where possible.
There are a few reasons for this:
Solar lighting together with LED technology uses no energy at all, while maintaining a similar level of brightness to mains lighting. Unless you need your space to be extremely bright (think Supermarket or office levels of brightness), solar is a much more sensible solution. Saving electricity not only reduces your cost of lighting each month, but also reduces your carbon footprint. By using less electricity, you’re reducing our dependence on smog-producing oil, coal, and natural gas, and lessening the need for potentially dangerous solutions like nuclear energy.
You also have the benefit of not going through lots of light bulbs when using a solar garden light system like you would with mains powered lights. The difference is extremely significant; you might go through several specialty bulbs a year for every light in your garden using conventional lights.
The cost savings are immediately obvious, especially considering you don’t lose out very much on total light provided, but there’s also the environmental impact to consider. Discarded light bulbs fill up landfills and can leak dangerous chemicals that pose environmental hazards. Cracked bulbs are in fact one of the leading causes of mercury leakages in landfills. These leakages have the potential to significantly damage underground water supplies and wildlife. This is becoming so problematic that many governments are considering the outright ban of halogen and incandescent lights, which are a major factor in most mains lighting systems. You can lessen your environmental impact by moving away from the use of mains lighting and using solar yard lights in their place.