In the last decades, lighting has evolved from a branch of engineering ensuring safety and performance in indoor and outdoor installations, to a key discipline interacting with a wide spectrum of fields and having a deep impact on our daily lives. Although this evolution also applies to other areas of knowledge, the special features of lighting make its potential and also its limitations different. It is not the typical field where a well-established mathematical framework allows a departure from well-defined input and identifying clear effects and conclusions. The reason is that lighting is a field dealing with the interaction between a physical phenomenon and a physiological and psychological system, the human being. In addition to the complexity of its basis, the relationship between lighting and sustainability has become stronger in recent years. This relationship is bi-directional in some cases: on one hand, advanced societies require more and more complex lighting installations, which means high energy consumption, use of raw materials, financial costs, manufacturing and maintenance processes, waste and emissions to the atmosphere. On the other hand, good lighting has an impact on issues like productivity, well-being, happiness, disease avoidance, safety, and many other qualitative aspects whose direct or indirect impact on sustainability is remarkable. This work will analyze how lighting can give answers to questions related to sustainability, not only from the classic topics of energy consumption and waste management, but from a wider and global perspective. The results of these works are analyzed, and the basis of the new framework of total lighting, discussed.