Lights go on at Sainsbury's

when we started this campaign we were told 'don't touch the coop' but now it seems the coop aren't such good guys after all. And when I went to visit IKEA they had more low energy bulbs than incandescent ones - and a better variety. And where is British Home Stores? Did anyone visit them? What is their commitment? They are part of a big chain so it would have been good to go for a big player. I wrote to Trevor B-J and got the standard reply but now when we visit Woolworths they say that they are in agreement with us. What part of agreement dont they understand?

It's like anything in life, there are good 'uns and not so good 'uns. Recently in the Guardian, Matt Prescott of Ban the Bulb did an ad hoc survey of the varying quality of bulbs produced by different manufacturers and his results are pretty interesting. Personally, I have a few Philips bulbs in my flat, including in some reading lamps, and they do the job fine.

But renewable energy or not, we still need to reduce our energy consumption. There's only a finite amount that can be generated at any given time, so by wasting energy in your home, demand from other people is pushed onto other, probably non-renewable sources. That's why renewables and efficiency go hand in hand so beautifully ;)

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Hmm, I'll need to check with the campaign team on this - it may be that they don't represent a big enough market share to spend time investigating. I'll report back when I find out.

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gpuk

Here's the story - back in March, the Co-op said they would remove incandescent bulbs from 50 branches as a trial, with a view to getting rid of them completely by the end of this year or next. We were keen to use them as an example for the rest of the industry and so ran that story, but since then we've been unable to get a firm commitment out of them for anything before 2011. In focusing on Woolworths, we neglected to point this out so apologies for that, but because the league table was based primarily on dates when retailers would stop selling incandescents, they got an E for effort. Hysteria - a lot of people have been getting responses from Trevor so it's strange you didn't. Perhaps his secretary has been on holiday. Everyone's been getting pretty much the same letter we got following our day of action, and I poo-pooed his excuses in an earlier blog post. web editor gpuk

Karen, most of your points are answered here, but I guess I'd say the use of incandescent bulbs is irresponsible when better technology exists. One not covered elsewhere is the question about whether it's better to leave CFLs on rather than switching them on and off. It depends on the type of CFL, but the power surge when you turn the light on is equivalent to about 90 seconds of use (although the worst performers can be up to five minutes). Given that CFLs use up to 80 per cent less electricity than incandescents, this is still pretty negligible given the energy saving over a bulb's lifetime. More info from the National Energy Foundation. hellopo... - The performance of companies can go down as well as up, and in this case the Co-op didn't come through on what they'd initially told us. Ikea does sell more CFLs and this was mentioned in the light bulbs report, but the main criteria was the date when they'd stop selling incandescents. We want retailers to shift ASAP, not in 2011. Not sure on BHS though - do they sell bulbs, or is it just light fittings? web editor gpuk

Hello Jamie regarding BHS, last time I visited them there was only 1 row of CFL's - on the bottom shelf! And a whole display full of incandescents that were a lot easier to reach. And to top it all there was a sign by the till saying 'don't forget to buy your bulbs' by Osram showing a nice shiny incandescent! And in response to bigpete, I buy my CFL's on line. Generally they are cheaper and you get a much better range, including types of light emitted (was that your problem, Pete?) and ones that can replace halogen (even though halogens are not that bad anyway). the new type come on quicker as well, which has always been a problem in the past. And BTW, I am writing this under a CFL that is over 12 years old.

Finally, I've found the time to ask about BHS. The league table was never intended as an exhaustive list of all light bulb retailers, and several other high street names aren't on there. When we're doing retailer work, there are always one or two names that come bottom of the list (that's the nature of a league table, and in this instance it was Woolworths) but the overall aim is to move the whole market, which is what we've seen with other companies like Morrisons and Sainsbury's improving their policies as well. The rather unexciting answer is, it wasn't an active omission, more that the names that do feature on the league table are the ones we figured would give us the most leverage to push for incandescent bulbs to be dumped. And, from the evidence we've seen so far, it's working. web editor gpuk