My green life actually started when I was a child, when my mother would take me with her to the recycling plant on the weekends. I would help her tear the covers off of magazines and the labels off of mayonnaise bottles before we’d throw them into the recycling machine. None of my friends quite understood what I did on the weekends with my mother–”What’s a recycling plant?” I remember them asking. “Is it for your garden?”

I grew up composting our food leftovers–my mother still does it to this day. God forbid you attempt to throw away a cantaloupe rind or anything else once edible in her house. Do it, and like a silent alarm in the garbage can, Mom comes running to rescue the recyclable food from its potential landfill purgatory. As a kid, if I wanted to get rid of a piece of paper, I was only allowed to to do so once I’d used every inch of it for writing down a shopping list, phone messages, or math problems I needed to solve for homework.

I still refuse to get rid of paper unless it’s been used on both sides, and as a magazine writer and book author, I get a lot of paper mailed to me—in the form of press kits. I will disassemble these kits and “harvest” clean paper that I can reuse in my printer. I recycle our cardboard and cereal board boxes—so much so that the recycling men have actually complained to us from time to time about the amount of recycling we put out. And I have to work hard not to cluck my tongue and judge my neighbors when I see them throwing out with the trash items that could easily be recycled.

Funny thing is, all of my green habits from childhood have saved us money–and I’m sure that was my mom’s thinking way back in the 1970s. Yes, she was being good to the earth but she also had our family’s bottom line in mind. For example, my habit of reusing paper? Well, thanks to it I can’t remember the last time I bought a case of printer paper. I’m sure most Americans go through a case in a couple of months, especially if they run a home office like I do. (According to one website, Americans use 700 pounds of paper per person each year.) Me, I don’t think I’ve purchased a new case of paper yet in 2007.

One thing is about to change in my recycling habits, though. I hope that very soon, I won’t be putting any more water bottles in our recycling bin. Yes, our family is still going to drink water but now we’re using reusable bottles instead.

We’re following a trend, I guess, that folks like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome have started. He recently banned the use of bottled water in his city, and for good reason: it seems that bottled water is one of the worst things for our environment. Something like only 20% of bottles actually end up getting recycled (the rest go in landfills), and the making and transporting of bottled water uses petroleum like nobody’s business: the bottles are made of a petroleum-based product, and then trucks use gas to get bottles from the bottling plants to the stores that sell them.

I think that this new habit will end up savings us money as well–no longer will I have to spend about $5 a case for water to pack with lunches or take with me on walks. Instead, recently I made a one-time $4.99 purchase (times four for the four of us) for reusable water bottles, with insulation, that I can fill from the tap.

It’s a small step in the right direction, I hope, for green mankind and my frugal budget.