Fluorescent v. Incandescent, Paper v. Plastic

Several posts back, I told you that Mark has jumped on the “Save the Environment” bandwagon since we watched Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Last week the light bulb in our family room lamp expired, and, after learning that a fluorescent burns less energy than an incandescent, he bought a coiled up fluorescent bulb.

One fluorescent equals the burn time of 13 incandescents.
90% of energy consumed by incandescents is wasted heat.

As lights throughout the house burn out, we’ll replace with fluorescent. While the bulbs are more expensive, they are cheaper in the long run because they last longer, use less energy ot give the same amount of light, and, in the summer, they won't heat up the house. They are, overall, a savings for your pocketbook and to our environment.

A few days ago Mark asked rhetorically, “Why do they even still make incandescent bulbs?” Thankfully, the question was rhetorical because I didn’t have any answer, but it got me thinking—or wondering why, in fact, do they still manufacture incandescent lightbulbs.

The night of Mark’s enlightening question, he watched another show and learned that about 12 million barrels of oil are used to produce the nearly 100 billion plastic bags we in American use (usually just once) every year. Now he asked, “Why do they make plastic bags?”

We could all do our part and buy fluorescent and reuse our bags or buy reusable, cloth bags.
When only purchasing a handful of items, ask the cashier to skip the bag.
At restaurants, go ahead and take home your leftovers—you paid for them, after all—just box them up yourself and skip the bag. (The only restaurant I know that gives a plastic bag in which to carry home the carton patrons scoop leftovers into is The Cheesecake Factory, but surely there are others out there. Choose paper over plastic at the grocery, but…

…from www.SierraClub.org/bags, “…the difference between paper and plastic RECYCLING is small…” But they preface this with “Paper is easier to recycle, being accepted in most recycling programs. The recycling rate for plastic bags is very low.” And before that the site gives these points in support of shopping with reusable, cloth bags:

• Reusing a bag meant for just one use has a big impact. A sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags.
  
• In New York City alone, one less grocery bag per person per year would reduce waste by 5 million lbs. and save $250,000 in disposal costs.
• 
  Plastic bags carry 80% of the nation's groceries, up from 5% in 1982.
• 
  When 1 ton of paper bags is reused or recycled, 3 cubic meters of landfill space is saved and 13 - 17 trees are spared! In 1997, 955,000 tons of paper bags were used in the United States.
  When 1 ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil are saved.

Every little thing helps, and they’re only little things.