Being kind to the environment (and your wallet!) is so much easier than you think, especially if you are in an apartment. Why especially? You are already living in a smaller space with less stuff and by definition should be consuming less energy than the person who lives in a house (think of the heating bill, which is a great example). Congratulations! Bet you didn’t even know living in an apartment could be an environmentally-friendly start, did you?

For my first tip, I’m going to recommend you start the New Year with less stress on your electric bill and the whole energy-making schematic by enlightening your life with energy-efficient lighting. It’s easy, cost-effective and has more impact than you think.

Newbie
Cost: about $20
Time: 30 minutes (run to the store and changing bulbs)
Energy to do this: minimal

Purchase one six-pack of Compact Florescent Lights (CFLs) to replace your most used lights. Because the CFLs use lower wattage to produce the same amount of light as standard bulbs (15 watts in a CFL is equal to a 60 watt regular bulb), the estimated savings on replacing just 6 lights in your house that you use up to 4 hours each day is $54 a year in your electric bill. That’s only $4.50 a month, but those bulbs will pay for themselves within 5 months!

The other impressive thing about this little change will keep an estimated 3 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the life of the six-pack of bulbs. To get an idea of that kind of impact, you’d have to live car-free for a little over 7 months to get the same CO2 impact!

Amateur Environmentalist
Cost: $20-$100 depending on how many lights you have
Time: 45 minutes (including run to the store and changing bulbs)
Energy to do this: minimal

Replace ALL your light bulbs with CFLs. It will cost you upfront, but if you’re like me, it’s worth it! We have 22 light bulbs in our apartment, which means it cost us about $80 to replace all the bulbs. But using the same calculations as above, we’re saving about $198 a year on our electricity bill – about $16.5 a month.

And in CO2 emissions, our change was the environmental equivalent living car-free for two years and two months! It has even been estimated that if every household in the U.S. replaced their lighting with energy-efficient lighting – like CFLs – we could comfortably retire 90 average sized power plants.

Certified Tree-Hugger
Cost: $0 – $121 + s/h
Time: Depends
Energy to do this: minimal

Despite all the wonders of those little compact fluorescents, there is a danger. CFLs contain the neurotoxin mercury, just like in all those warnings about contaminated fish you keep hearing about. This means dumping them in the trash when they eventually burn out is not a good option. The best thing to do is recycle your CFL bulbs. Depending on your situation, you have two options.

One: if you have an IKEA near you, you can recycle all your CFLs there for free! (See their site for more details.) It’s a lovely service provided by a fabulous company.

Two: if you don’t have an IKEA near you, you can purchase a CFL recycling kit here. Yes, it’s a little pricey but you don’t really want to dump mercury into our landfills which will leak into our drinking water now do you? I didn’t think so.

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Like the tip but have an even better one? Leave it in a comment!