Why I started ecoLightbulbs

Ever since I was a child I've been interested in environmentally friendly practices. When I was about 10 years old I received a book who's name eludes me now, but basically the book had 100 things you could do to save the earth. I remember going around my house putting milk jugs in the toilet to reduce the amount of water used in flushes, taking food scraps and building a composting pile in our back yard, and many other things.

Now, years later, as an adult I continue to be passionate about the environment and living in a way that preserves our environment as much as possible. In recent years more and more news has come out about the dangers of global warming and how never ending increases in consumption by humans is destroying the world at an unprecedented pace. After thinking for this for a while I decided that I should stop sitting around waiting for others to fix the problems that we've all created, and that I should try... to the best of my ability to help preserve our planet.

So what am I going to do:

Global warming comes down to the creation of greenhouse gases. There are two ways to reduce this impact. Make energy more efficiently (i.e., solar panels, windpower, cleaner burning fuels, etc..) or use less energy. I am focusing on the latter and working on ways to reduce overall energy consumption, specifically by promoting the adoption and use of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

The plan is to acquire the bulbs as cheaply as possible and distribute them at as low of a cost as possible to as many people as possible. To achieve this we are going to pursue the following areas:

• Find the best balance of high quality bulbs at the lowest cost.
  
• Sell directly to consumers at no profit to ecoLightbulbs - by removing middlemen retails from the equation we believe we can provide the bulbs to consumers at much lower cost than current exists in the market
• Find co-marketing arrangements where people reading materials about compact fluorescents can then directly move to purchase the bulbs, instead of waiting to find them at a store

Through the combination of these approaches, we hope to sell many many bulbs. Increasing usage and adoption of the bulbs will hopefully spur the market to increase production of these light bulbs, driving down costs. Eventually our hope is that adoption and use of these bulbs is so widespread that our organization is no longer needed.

As for my day job, I work at Google in Mountain View, CA as a product manager building advertising products. I thought that I'd try to leverage some of the things I've learned during my time at Google to build a not-for-profit business that could help change the landscape of how people light their homes.

If you have any questions or comments about what we're doing feel free to email me anytime at wayne@ecolightbulbs.org. I'd love to hear from you!