Phil Gutis's Blog
Hurray for Home Depot!
June 24, 2008
Posted by Phil Gutis in Curbing Pollution , Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , The Media and the Environment
This weekend, the husband and I stopped by Home Depot to see if we could find shelves to house my out-of-control Kidrobot collection. We got our shelves -- at a huge discount in fact -- but still walked out a couple thousand dollars poorer.
How? Well, we finally bought a new refrigerator, replacing our ancient grumbling sweating box with a sleek French door model from LG. Most importantly, it was an Energy Star model and from I could tell from comparison shopping, it operates at the lowest end of the energy consumption scale.
So what transformed a simple trip for cheap shelving into a major investment in home appliances? Home Depot was offering a gift card worth as much as $250 for buying an Energy Star appliance. Combine that with a 10 percent sale and free delivery and removal of the existing refrigerator and I figure we saved about $600. That's real money and we're not even talking about the energy savings.
After our credit card failed to melt at checkout, I felt good about the purchase and about Home Depot for offering the $250 gift card as an incentive to switch to Energy Star. I recognize that it is their enlightened self interest to help sell refrigerators and other appliances but it also educates -- and prods -- folks like us who knew our refrigerator was a energy monster to make the shift.
And then this morning, while flipping through The New York Times, I saw the prominent news that Home Depot has started a recycling program for compact fluorescent light bulbs. Home Depot -- the nation's second largest retailer -- will announce today that it will take back CFLs at all of its 1,973 stores in the United States, a move that the Times says will create "the nation's most widespread recycling program for the bulbs."
CFLs carry a very small amount of mercury -- roughly equivalent in size to the tip of a ballpoint pen -- and, according to an excellent NRDC fact sheet, it is sealed within the glass tubing.
I've previously applauded Home Depot for starting, among other programs, a new line of environmentally friendly paints and for actively encouraging the purchase of energy saving bulbs.
"We're trying to do the right thing," Ron Jarvis, Home Depot's senior vice president for environmental innovation, told the Times. "Some of the things we do are for the community and not for the bottom line."
The cynical journalist in me finds that really hard to swallow, but in this case I'm prepared to let go and believe. It feels good to do that every once in a while.
(bookmark or email this entry)
- Phil Gutis
- Director of Communications
- New York City
- I'm NRDC's Director of Communications so Switchboard and NRDC.org are ultimately my responsibility. (Cheers or...
- more→
