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Earth Day is coming, in fact it is this Sunday, April 22nd. In honor of that fact, Home depot is GIVING AWAY 1 million Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs. This Sunday, all you have to do is show up at the Home Depot and the will give you a CFL bulb. While you are there you might as well pick up a few more. The free bulbs will be N:Vision soft whites, which were the best in a recent Popular Mechanic’s lab Test. In giving away 1 million bulbs Home Depot accomplishes the following :

• $12 million dollars in savings in annual energy costs
• Reduction of 196 million pounds of CO2 emissions
• The CO2 emissions reduction is equivalent to taking 70,000 cars off the American Highways.

In addition to the Home Depot giving away light bulbs, they have stepped up their promotion of “Green Living” by launching an “Eco Options” portion of their webpage. The webpage gives advice on how to live greener, and what products they sell to help you achieve that goal. One feature of the website that I found interesting was the “energy efficient” tab (its in red). This tab takes you to a page that approximates that amount of money and energy you will save by switching from standard bulbs to CFL bulbs. You should take a look and see what you can do.

Lastly, you need to visit the One Billion Bulbs webpage. The motto for the page is: “Changing the world one bulb at a time”. The goal of the website is to change 1 Billion standard lightbulbs to 1 Billion CFL lightbulbs. Its a tall goal, but they are already at around 50,000 bulbs changed. I’d say that is a pretty good start. It’s free to sign up, so go ahead and sign up, then register the number of standard bulbs that you have changed for CFL’s. The site has set goals for each state to reach each of the phases (They are currently in Phase 2 with a goal of 50,000). I am going to list the states that I know we have readers in :

• Indiana, needs 277 more bulbs changed
• Maryland, needs 221 more bulbs changed
• West Virginia, needs 61 more bulbs changed
• Virginia, needs 359 more bulbs changed
• Kentucky, needs 123 more bulbs changed
• Arizona and Washington have both reached the goal set for their state for phase 2!

The 1 billion bulbs page is pretty cool so poke around and see what you can find. They have a better calculator than the Home Depot page, and they even have reviews for all types of CFL bulbs. Check it out!

So get to Home Depot this weekend and pick up a CFL bulb for free.

Ian