Ace Hardware to recycle lights

For the fourth consecutive year, Ace Hardware stores across Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico are accepting strands of holiday lights for recycling to benefit Lights For Life. Lights For Life is a nonprofit organization that strives to make life easier for kids with cancer and their families. This year, Ace Hardware stores will also accept extension cords for recycling.

Lights For Life sells the donated light strands and extension cords to a recycling company for the copper and PVC they contain. The money raised is used to help children with cancer and their families cover the cost of medical bills and other expenses not covered by insurance, as well as to fund kids' camps and childhood cancer research.

Last year, Ace Hardware customers across the three states donated more than 30,000 pounds of holiday lights to the campaign, raising $14,000 for families of children diagnosed with cancer and bringing the total amount of lights donated by local Ace customers since 2008 to more than 77,000 pounds. Local stores hope to increase this year's donation by 50 percent and have set a goal of collecting 45,000 pounds of holiday lights and extension cords during the 2011 holiday season.

"Every year, more and more shoppers are making the switch to longer-lasting, more energy efficient LED light strands, and we wanted to give people an easy way to put their old light strands and extension cords to good use," said Clark Evans, manager of Orchards Ace Hardware in Loveland. Orchards Ace shoppers alone have donated more than 14,000 pounds of lights over the past four years. "Last year we were able to help the families of two Rocky Mountain Region children with cancer as a results of this program, and we hope consumers pitch in to help us do the same again this year."

According to Consumer Reports, a typical homeowner spends approximately $11 in energy costs to burn 50 feet of traditional lights for 300 hours, while the same use of LED lights costs less than 15 cents. LED lights are also more durable than incandescent lights, often lasting as much as ten times longer than traditional lights, and because LED lights burn cooler they are safer to use and reduce the risk of fire.

"Each year, more than 200 million strings of incandescent lights are sold in the U.S., and most of them end up in the landfill," said Linda Worthington, marketing director Lights For Life. "Just the small act of dropping your broken or old lights or extension cords in a collection bin at an Ace Hardware can make a big difference in the lives of the families of kids with cancer."

Holiday lights and extension cords can be dropped off at participating Ace Hardware stores between November 15 and February 15. The holiday light recycling program adds to the growing list recycling programs offered by area Ace Hardware stores. Many Ace Hardware stores also accept used compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), mercury-containing thermostats, used cell phones and rechargeable batteries for recycling.

Every picture tells a story: How Tom Lubbock changed the way we view great art

Imagine a film of a man on a bicycle. It's a stationary exercise-bicycle, and he's pedalling away for all he's worth. It is night, or anyway a place of total darkness, and all that illuminates this cyclist is a small spotlight aimed at his body. He goes on pedalling hard, and you begin to wonder what he's really doing, or what the point is of this strenuous nocturnal scene, until you perceive that, from time to time, there's some slight fluctuation in the strength of the lighting; and then you notice that there's a cable running from the light to the bicycle, and it's attached to a dynamo on the bicycle, and that the man is pedalling in order to make the light shine. His visibility, in other words, is dependent on his activity.

Now imagine these three short films turned into three still images. Each one would be curious. With movement that doesn't show, there'd be no difference between a film and a still. With an imminent, suspended climax, you wouldn't need any looping trickery, the still image by itself would put things on hold, and maintain an endless "any moment now". With the lighting generator, the subject's visibility wouldn't be – what it normally is in pictures – an assumption. It would be a contingency. You'd have a scene that implied a change of scene, where the light was out and everything was lost.

El Greco's Boy Lighting a Candle shows a boy blowing on an ember. It's an action that, while it lasts, can be perfectly steady and show no change. The passage of the air is invisible. The pursed lips, the glow of the ember, the hold of the hands: all these things can stay as they are for a while. It is movement without any movement to be seen, while it lasts. Of course this process can't continue for ever. His lungs will soon run out of air.

Who knows how much puff is left? We can't tell, but it can't last. And when the boy's breath fails, the ember will fade too, and the whole scene, lit entirely from this light source, will revert to darkness – unless he can get the candle to catch and hold on to that light in time.

It is one of the great pictorial subjects. With its play between stillness and timing and visibility, between breath and light, it's rich in allegorical possibilities, in thoughts of life and death. At the same time it's based on a simple, natural physical event – the beautiful two-way relationship between a face and an ember. The face blows air upon the ember, causing the ember to shine back upon the face. The boy puffs himself into light. While he breathes, he is there before us.

It's painted in the most realistic style El Greco ever used, and it looks like everyday life. It was, in fact, inspired by classical example. Almost no paintings survive from ancient Greece, but many are described by the Roman author, Pliny the Elder, in his encyclopaedic work Natural History.

Post-Renaissance artists often tried to recreate them. El Greco painted several versions and variants of this subject. So did other artists, after him, in the following century. It's not clear, though, whether any of them realised the original idea in full. Because what Pliny describes is not just a picture, it's an installation.