Finally, a place to recycle all those dead holiday tree string lights!
MOM’s Organic Market in Timonium has a great Recycle Center that not only accepts shoes, batteries and corks, but also collects incandescent holiday string lights until January 31, 2015. MOM’s Organic Market sends the lights to a recycler who shreds the lights and then separates into PVC, glass and copper. Last year the environmentally-focused retailer collected over 64,000 feet of lights. MOM’s Organic Market will even offset your roundtrip to the store by purchasing carbon credits through TerraPass.
Your incentive to recycle? The 15 percent discount you’ll receive to buy energy efficient light-emitting diodes (LED) holiday lights at the online retailer HolidayLEDs.com HolidayLEDs.com even sells pretty white tree lights that look just like the kilowatt-sucking incandescents. Gone are the days of the cold-blue-white-LED-lights.
Here’s why it’s worth the trip to recycle those lights: You are wasting energy and money. Old-fashion incandescent lightbulbs waste 90 percent of the electricity used. That’s why those clunkers are so hot to the touch. Lighting can be up to 15 percent of your home electric bill, so you’re also wasting cash if you haven’t switched to more efficient lights.
Just ask Paul Stasko of Lutherville, Maryland. He’d had enough of listening to how low GreenLaurel’s electricity bill is each month, so he switched every lightbulb in his home to an LED. He saves at least $125 on every month’s BGE bill. No kidding. Energy-efficient lightbulbs are also affordable because of the EmPOWER Maryland lighting rebates.
That’s just green happiness.
