A new website called Pushing Green is setting up competitions enticing people to scale back on their energy consumption, combining the features of social media with going green. The best part of their offering is that the person who saves the most energy each month will get their month’s energy bill paid for.
Going green with social media
Pushing Green promotes cutting saving energy as a team, and as such makes it easy to invite friends to your own energy-saving team via email or Facebook. Once you have your team set up, you can see the efforts that everyone is taking and build some friendly competition amongst yourselves. Once you start saving some serious energy, you can track the positive impact you are having with real-world statistics, and if your team comes out on top you will be in the running for a free month’s worth of energy bills.
Answer the challenge of going green
Rather than tracking the effects of random acts of energy efficiency around the house, Pushing Green lays out clear challenges for members to pick up and participate in. For example, some of the challenges running now ask members to reduce the temperature of your water heater by 20 degrees (which will help you save around $450/year and earn you +5 Pushing Green points), replace 10 old incandescent bulbs for CFLs (which will save around $325/year and earn +12 Pushing Green Points), and getting a quote for high-efficiency windows (which will save around $840/year and earn Pushing Green members 25 points).
Check out the full list of challenges currently being run by clicking here.
A unique green idea – but will it work?
The idea of using relatively easy real-world challenges to get people to go green around their homes is a great idea, and as we’ve learned from Recyclebank, incentive-based initiatives are the best way to get people to take action. However, will Pushing Green be able to come up with enough challenges on an ongoing basis to keep the competition moving forward?
Regardless of the site’s future successes, Pushing Green is providing a great new venue for people to share their initiatives in going green, and set new standards for energy efficiency around the home.
