Maplewood Goes Green One Bulb at a Time
Maplewood, which celebrated its first town-wide Green Day in October 2007, is a town to set green standards by.
In particular, Maplewood’s new Police Building was designed to be the first LEED certified “green” municipal building in New Jersey. In addition, Maplewood received a 2007 Climate Champion Award from Clean Air-Cool Planet, a leading non-profit finding and promoting solutions to global warming in the Northeast.
Maplewood residents have signed approximately 800 pledges to change at least five bulbs per household. As of December 2007, Maplewood residents have pledged to change over 5,300 bulbs from incandescent to fluorescent. The result is an estimated yearly savings of 1,499,958 kilowatt hours in electricity and the elimination of 2,175,471 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions!
Artificial lighting consumes almost 15 percent of a household’s electricity use. If every American home replaced just one incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb, enough energy will be saved to light more than three million homes for a year, save more than $600 million in annual energy costs and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emission of more than 800,000 cars. These bulbs use about 75 percent less energy than standard bulbs, last up to 10 times longer andsave $30 or more in electricity costs over each bulb’s lifetime.
