Stop Light and Heat Pollution

By Tom Berkovich, Year 5

Turn Off Your Lights! 30% of outdoor lighting is wasted and the entire 60% of light from bulbs becomes heat on average! People say that they will come back later to the room, but they don’t. They’re losing money, messing up animal navigation, creating more heat, destroying a stargazer's life, and worse, speeding up the horrible effects of climate change. That happens because more electricity is being used, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere and speeding up global warming.

Make sure that you have efficient and cheap lights. Incandescents are horrible. 90% is heat rather than light, costs a crazy amount of money, and has the shortest life span, just four months with the best! Halogen lights are a bit better but make almost as much heat, which is not great, and last just two to four months long on average. CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lights) are much better than the others and last one to two years. They make about 70% heat, and 30% light. Another thing to note if you have them is that when frequently turned on and off, their lifespan is shortened. If you leave them on, make sure you come back in up to fifteen minutes.

LED lights are the best. They last three and a half years to five and a half years and emit only 15% heat.

The reason why all those horrible effects are created is because some people don’t take into consideration the difference between two light bulbs, they think that they will leave and come back, but really, they never do or when they come back it is much later. And the most embarrassing and simple reason, we forget. There is no concrete way to remind or persuade people to fix this problem, but people who do, will begin a fight against heat pollution and climate change. There is also an annoying but fixable reason. The government makes LED lights much more expensive than the others. This is not only because they are the best. They are hard to make and cost more. Therefore, they are more expensive. If there was an easier and cheaper way to create LEDs, a great revolution would come.

So how do you remember to turn them off? Well, of course people can simply put in the effort to remember or hang up some little home-made posters in rooms where people usually leave the lights on. If you leave your lights on because you think nothing bad is going to happen, well now you know all the effects that happen regardless of you, unless you simply only use the lights when you need to, and turn them off when you leave. If you leave them on because you think you’ll come back, ignore the thought and tell yourself that every minute wasted is bad for the environment and will eventually be an even bigger cause of climate change. It makes 5% of the effects and that may seem small but that is incorrect. It is very large, though definitely not the largest. The biggest is the burning of fossil fuels. But turning the lights off is definitely the easiest to solve. So next time you leave a light on, think about all the effects that could happen when they aren’t needed.

Please return library books!