Everyone's Duty

According to the German newspaper Die Welt, the Chinese people have rushed to purchase energy-saving bulbs not due to energy consciousness, but thanks to government incentives.

However, that is not exactly the whole story with Mrs. Zhao, a resident of Beijing. After trying a one-yuan energy-saving bulb, she claims that the luminance of an 8w energy-saving bulb is equal to that of a 40w filament bulb. But it consumes only one-fifth the energy of the latter. What's more, the average life of an energy-saving bulb is 6,000 hours, or four times that of the filament lamp. Mrs. Zhao says she will keep on purchasing energy-saving bulbs even though they have ended the subsidies. "It may not seem like a big deal for one of us to do this. But the result will be significant if everyone does," Mrs. Zhao states.

Ms. Tang is an employee of a real estate company that mainly develops energy-saving houses, so has a strong sense of environmental protection. "The prices of energy-saving appliances now are very reasonable, given the subsidies from both the government and the retailers," she says. "As for buying electric appliances for my own home, I pay closer attention to the environmental friendliness of energy-saving appliances. After all, it is everyone's duty to protect our earth."

True to Ms. Tang's words, a survey probing the environmental protection awareness of Shanghai citizens conducted by the Shanghai Academy of Social Science showed that 48.8 percent of the interviewees took being frugal with energy consumption as the first priority when considering new purchases of household appliances.

The motivations for integrating energy-saving products into our daily lives are many.