The Light pollution is a consequence of artificial lighting at night. It is most simply defined as any artificial light that spills into the environment. This part of light is wasted, causing many environmental and economic problems (wasted light = wasted electrical energy). After a short general introduction, the situation in Croatia is presented, with the main conclusions based on results from B.Sc. thesis of Zdenko Kordić. It turns out that yearly cost of public lighting per capita varies from community to community, with extremes of 0 and 50 EUR. Most big cities have cost close to the average of 13 EUR for energy related costs and 19 EUR for total costs of public lighting.
Recalculating this for the whole country, the total costs turn out to be about 83 million EUR per year. Reducing this by only 10%, which is not hard to achieve by modernizing the lighting networks, would save 8.3 million EUR per year, and would also help reducing CO2 emissions.
