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...