Try a Little Sticker Shock

When I was a child in the early 1970s, every classroom light switch in my elementary school bore a bright orange-and-black sticker reminding us to turn out the lights when they weren’t in use. The stickers worked then and work today: I still can’t walk out of a room — an empty room — without killing the lights. Old habits die hard.

In the years following the 1973 energy crisis, the message implicit in each sticker was clear without being preachy: save energy. Clear too was the impact the stickers could have, later research showed. Two Canadian studies, carried out in the 1980s and 1990s, found that introducing the stickers into an office environment could prod workers into cutting their use of electric lights by about 15%.

The stickers work because they remind us the lights are on in the first place. Most of us are perfectly capable of turning on a light, and leaving it on, without giving that flick of the switch a moment’s thought. Sometimes a simple message emblazoned on a bright sticker is all it takes to get us to change our behavior for the better.

The stickers also work because they restore in our minds the connection between the lights overhead and the fossil fuels burned to make the electricity they draw. Typically, power plants are miles and miles from the home, office or school. That ensures the smokestacks stay well out of both sight and mind.  A sticker can’t close that physical distance, but it can narrow any mental gap and get us thinking about the real world consequences of our actions.

I don’t know how common light-switch stickers are in classrooms these days. But I rarely see them in places where promoting a little thrift couldn’t hurt. Maybe it’s time to bring them back en force, this time with a more explicit message—like “SAVE ENERGY”.

Energy conservation is still a laudable goal, for sure, and the stickers could still push that message. Today, though, we’re just as worried about greenhouse gas emissions. Whenever we burn oil, gas or coal to make electricity, more greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide chief among them, enter the atmosphere. But just how much is neither obvious nor well understood.

Take the electric light example. If you live in the United States, there’s a good chance the electricity you use came from a coal-fired power plant. Coal generates half the nation’s electricity, after all.

Say you keep a 100-watt bulb burning in your classroom for eight hours a day, five days a week. By the time Friday afternoon rolls around, that light bulb will have used four kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.

On one hand, that electricity is cheap: about 36 cents, at an average U.S. retail price of 8.9 cents per kilowatt-hour. Its cost to the atmosphere is something else.

That is because it takes a little more than a pound of coal to generate a kilowatt-hour’s worth of electricity. And in burning coal, a power plant also generates about 2.1 pounds of carbon dioxide for each kilowatt-hour it produces. (How can the mass of the CO2 be greater than the mass of the coal? Don’t forget that a lot of oxygen gets consumed in the process.)

So that little light bulb, at the end of a 40-hour work week, will have gobbled up four pounds of coal and released another 8.4 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that’s 302 pounds of CO2.

Now, what if that light bulb took recess and lunch along with your students, and stayed off an extra 72 minutes or 15 percent of the school day? That would reduce its annual CO2 emissions by 45 pounds— about what a kindergartner weighs.

That’s a whole lesson’s worth of information and way too much to cram on a small sticker. Maybe just adding “CUT EMISSIONS” would do the trick. It’s less of shock but it’s a message that still sticks.

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