MORE THAN THREE YEARS after its establishment, Barbados-based manufacturer Caribbean LED Lighting Inc. has saved companies and individuals more than $12 million in annual electricity costs.
And in so doing, the company has allowed customers to reduce their power consumption by more than 12 000 barrels of oil.
This was revealed last week as the company, based at Lower Estate, St Michael, hosted United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
After being established in September 2011, Caribbean LED now has a staff of more than 35 and is exporting to 14 countries in the Caribbean and Central America. It also has distributors in Turks & Caicos, St Lucia, St Kitts & Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago.
After Ban said he was impressed with what he had seen and would be telling the world about it, an upbeat executive chairman, Jim Reid, said “we think that we are playing our part”.
“Every single person in this company before they came here was unemployed. We are creating green colour jobs, we are showing that we can [manufacture] as good a product as anywhere else in the world to the highest international standards and sell them at the right price,” he said.
“We can manufacture [items] here and sell cheaper than you can buy at Walmart in the [United States],that speaks volumes about what we can in the Caribbean. We can be sustainable, we can move forward and we are very excited.”
Information from the company said it was “committed to reducing the carbon footprint and helping our customers do the same through a partnering approach”.
“The vision of the company . . . is to be the leading manufacturer and provider of the highest quality LED lighting products in the Caribbean and Central America. CLL is proud to say that we create green collar jobs through increased manufacturing capability and diversify the economy by introducing new technology,” it added. (SC)