Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time
Last week, to celebrate my 42nd birthday, I did the "green mom, back-to-basics, connect-with-nature, be-at-peace-with-my-laugh-lines" trek to beautiful Joshua Tree, with three of my girlfriends and their kids.

The thing about Joshua Tree on the cusp of summer is that it is close to 100 degrees. But I was prepared for the heat -- and prepared to keep my birthday group prepared (and hydrated) -- with reusable water bottles for each one. No piles of sparkletts minis were going to fill our rooms -- there was just no way I was going to make needless waste on the day of my birth.

The first day was a scorcher -- climbing at 7:30 am, the mercury moved past 82. We were well armed: hats, sunscreen and of course our trusty water bottles. But then my son started complaining that his bottle was leaking -- which in fact it was -- leaving him atop a rock panting from thirst.

Here was the problem: we had two days left and we were down a water bottle. To most people, this would be an easily solved dilemma: go buy a few packaged water bottles from the canteen and call it a day. But for me, well aware that we Americans throw away 60 million plastic water bottles per day, I had a hard time doing this. A really hard time. But I had to get over it -- and for that weekend, I shamelessly contributed to this shocking number, knowing full well that you can't stop drinking water in the desert.

The next plastic challenge during my birthday weekend came when one of my girlfriends presented the kids with gleaming new, PLASTIC, battery-operated water guns...

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time

One of the biggest challenges I face as a mother comes in a strange shape and size. It is something that often keeps me up at night, and I have on many occasions tortured my seven-year-old son for not following my very specific directions about how to handle it. It is the dreaded PLASTIC BAGGIE.

Baggies in my house are a red flagged item. As a mother who is concerned about the environment, getting a shade greener every day (and raising a son who is obsessed with the environment), baggies take up a lot of airtime in our house. Why? Why do Baggies get this much attention? Well, it's simple.

I have almost perfected packing him a waste-free lunch. Every morning we wake up and pack a healthy organic lunch in his reusable, insulated lunch bag made from recycled plastic soda bottles, with the green frog print on it (now that is a product all moms must have). But every so often, my perfectly balanced (well, not really -- what mom has anything perfectly balanced?) waste-free lunch goes awry... when my son cries out for chips in his lunch.

If he wants chips, what do I put them in? I have everything else down to a science, and in my calculations I have figured out that in a year's time the average school lunch creates as much weight in waste as a nine-year-old child! So with this in mind, when the call for chips comes, I cringe, grab a baggie, and recite the following rules to my seven year old...

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time

As a mother and writer, my motivation and inspiration have often been how to give up the least and have the most. Shocking I know. I am always trying to see how shifting a habit can make a difference. And what happens if we all do it?

I know that if any group make things happen, it's women, and especially mothers. I've listed below some of my favorite small shifts that I've made recently while grocery shopping and around my home.

1. Buy sliced bread that is only packaged in a single wrapper rather than a double wrapper. Double-wrapped loaves contain more plastic. The waste generated by this additional wrapper across all households in the U.S. and Canda would weigh nearly 60,000 pounds -- or the total weight of all the food you will ever eat in your lifetime.

2. Buy block cheese instead of the pre-sliced individually wrapped servings. The energy used to make the plastic wrappers for slices of American cheese amounts to the equivalent of more than 13.8 million gallons of gasoline per year.

3. Run full loads in your dishwasher to save energy, and don't pre-rinse before putting dishes in. Do both and you'll save up to 20 gallons of water per dish load, or 7,300 gallons over a year. That's as much water as the average person drinks in a lifetime

4. Try to flush just one less time per day, and you'll save about 4.5 gallons of water -- as much water as the average person in Africa uses for a whole day of drinking, cooking, bathing and cleaning. (This is my son's favorite rule!)

5. Try to limit canned fruit, and eat fresh fruit over the summer months whenever possible. The process involved in canning is at least 10 times more energy intensive than picking fresh fruit. If every U.S. household replaced just one pound of canned or jarred fruit with one pound of fresh fruit during each of the summer months, the total energy saved could operate the kitchen appliances of over 21,000 households for an entire year.

6. Use fewer paper napkins everywhere. Each of us consumes on average 2,200 2 ply napkins per year, or the equivalent of 6 a day. If everyone in the U.S. used an average of one less napkin per day, more than 1 billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year.

7. Buy loose, unwrapped candy from the bin. Many candy wrappers contain chemicals that make them stain and water resistant, but which also make them difficult to recycle.

If you want to see more of where those came from -- and what's been taking up the better part of my life -- check out ReadTheGreenBook.com.

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time

I must be doing something right. Despite living in such a disposable society I am raising a child -- a seven-year-old boy -- who is obsessed with recycling. He's got the basics down: aluminum, glass, newspaper and plastic. But he's on a mission to see how far he can push the recycling envelope.

Now that he understands that we all create 4.5 pounds of trash a day, he has actually started to weigh his trash and his recycling to see if he can make more of the good than the bad. But sometimes I worry and wonder what must go through his little mind as he wanders into my bedroom at night to ask me things like, "Can you recycle this mom?" holding up a stuffed toy Viking I got him last year in Iceland. "No honey, go back to bed."

It doesn't stop there with the little mind. We did a "day of waste" in his classroom, and I explained to the kids that over the course of our lifetime each of us will create 600 times our adult weight in garbage. It was hard for us to imagine that, so we made a garbage monster and it went something like this: Broken down, your torso would be paper, one leg would be yard trimmings, the other food scraps, one arm would be plastic with a rubber hand, the other would be metal with a wood hand, your head would be glass and your neck would be all the other stuff.

"In the end," I told my son's first grade class, "We all leave behind a 90,000-pound legacy of trash for our grandchildren."

They were a little scared of me at that point.

Still my son persevered on his quest to push the trash to the limit...

Elizabeth Rogers, co-writer of The Green Book, The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet, One Simple Step at a Time
The other day I realized that my obsession with waste, plastic and getting to the end of the school year without buying anything new might have gotten the best of me.

My son came home from school with a broken lunch box. The zipper was shot. Two more weeks left. I had had high hopes that one lunchbox would have seen us to the end. I was not going to CVS to buy a plastic lunch box for the next day. I had to put a rubber band around it for him for the next day of school. Then I rushed online to ReusableBags.com and ordered him the lunch bag made from recycled plastic soda bottles (cool totes -- a large insulated lunch bag for $18.95). But I was so frenzied that it get here right away, I spent an extra $19.95 to ship it overnight. So now I'm spending more to ship it than the bloody blue-bag-with-green-frogs lunchtote actually cost!

My son comes home the next day, broken bag in hand, to check out his new recycled lunch tote.

"Mom," he says, completely mortified.

He tells me that he is not a baby, and he won't carry anything with green frogs any more. I had gotten so caught up in my "greenness" and the fact that it was the "right" lunch box for him that I forgot to see it for what it was, which was a lunch box for a three year old, not a seven year old. So now I'm out $38.90, we still have no lunch box, and I have to give the green frogs to the cleaning lady who by the way thinks I've gone mad...