Back in July, Brooke and I started consciously trying to simplify and reduce our "footprint" in the world.  One of the biggest, ugliest footprints we could think of was our power consumption.  Don't get me wrong, we didn't actively waste power before.  We drive two small Hondas.  We keep the heat at 68 and a/c at 78.  However, we could clearly do better. 

By simply replacing all our light bulbs with CFL bulbs, and by being very conscious of when we used A/C this summer, I think we've made a sizeable difference in our kilowatt hours used per month.  I was going to save this post for after I collected more comparison data, but I was so shocked by the initial results, that I couldn't wait.  See the 2006 vs 2007 (to-date) comparison chart to the left.

It's not hard to see where we started trying, and it's not hard to imagine what the rest of this year's line might look like if we keep it up.  Perhaps the most amazing thing to me is that we were able to make such a noticeable difference with almost zero impact on our "life style" and without having to give up very much.

We've now converted every incandescent light bulb we could (around 40-50 of 'em) to a compact fluorescent (CFL).  Since incandescent bulbs are only about 2% efficient and CFLs are around 8%, it seems like a no-brainer.  CFLs also last about 8 to 15 times as long as the incandescent cousins.  After buying and trying a few different brands (and reading some reviews online) we picked up a whole slew of N:Vision bulbs at our local Home Depot.  I've read that lighting accounts for 9% of the energy in a typical home.  If CFLs use about 20% what a comparable incandescent uses, I figure I could reduce by energy usage by ~7%.  We'll see if reality reflects my math.

I got some great feedback on my God is green, why aren't we? post from last week.  Brooke and I are serious about making changes to reduce our impact on the earth.  In the past, it felt like there was nothing an average joe like me could do, now there are so many good things to do, we're overwhelmed.

Our solution is to break the problem up.  We're going to tackle one new solution per week for a while until the list is gone.  We know things will reach a point where the one-a-week rate is too quick for us to keep it up, and the process will probably take us years if not the rest of our lives.  It's a journey, and one that we're excited about joining.  As a result, I'll be posting here about what what we're currently up to.  And now the first of many posts...

This week's focus is recycling.  We signed up for the Ottawa County Health Department's recycling program.  They give you a yearly membership for $40 which includes a card giving us access to all three recycling centers around the county.  In addition to the free-of-charge program for hazardous waste, they accept: