Wal-Mart Hits Goal Of Selling 100 Million Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Early
by Justin Thomas, Virginia on 10.23.07
Last year, Wal-Mart announced an ambitious goal — they wanted to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs in one year. Wal-Mart's announcement generated a lot of discussion on TreeHugger. Now the company has announced that they've already achieved that goal. Wal-Mart estimates that these energy-saving bulbs will have the effect of taking 700,000 cars off the road, or conserving the energy needed to power 450,000 single-family homes. But, while I'm glad to see that sales of CFLs are brisk, Wal-Mart has not committed to recycling any of the bulbs they sell. By contrast, Ikea has a simple fluorescent bulb recycling program in place in all their stores.
I hope that some of the mercury-containing bulbs that Wal-Mart sells will be disposed of properly.
If you do happen to have some fluorescent bulbs that need recycling you can use Earth 911 to find the nearest disposal site, or you can drop them in the disposal bins at Ikea.
:: Via CNNMoney and Practical Environmentalist
We picked up a 6 pack of the 60 watt ones last time we were there it was only about $10 - sadly Walmart is about the only thing near us that has most things you need.
So I can see how they would have sold 100 million of them pretty quickly.
that is really fantastic numbers! cheers
CFL's are sometimes underwritten by your local electric utility. Out here, PG&E (Milpitas) and Palo Alto have sold CFLs for $0.25 and $0.20 each at local grocery and hardware stores. Give them a call.
Ikea stores aren't really all that common -- or easy to get to. Here's hoping for more and better disposal options for these otherwise great light bulbs.
Wal-mart gets so much flack. This is a positive step for them. I hope it does not bite them in the ass when these bulbs are at the end of their cycle. Future headlines: Wal-mart to blame for record levels of mercury in ground water.
I don't care how "green" walmart gets, until they change their small-town-economy-destroying ways, I'll never shop there. No other company does more to destroy high-wage jobs and replace them with low-wage jobs than walmart. Some day we'll all make less money and be forced to seek price savings at walmart — that's the walmart dream.
The blister packaging that has become so prevalent in compact florescent light packaging kills me. It is a step in the right direction to change your lights to compact florescent bulbs, however a step in the wrong direction to buy it in the oversized acetate blister pack. Look for the ones in the sleeves.
I have to agree with "brownjeans." Wal-Mart's taking a step forward on green issues is the equivalent of going from "extremely bad" to "very bad." In the big picture, Wal-Mart has a lot of atoning to do.
For instance, does Wal-Mart use florescent bulbs in its stores? Do they buy carbon offsets? And how about the 18,000 acres they take up nationwide?
Remember this graph? -- http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/007/trans007storespace.html