But since my stockpile has grown nice and big, I’ve started to have a change of conscience (pang of guilt).  I do still love the thrill of chasing a bargain, but I want to be certain that the products I’m bringing into my home are worth their price — even when that price is free.

So, in the spirit of being both green and frugal, I’m bringing you some link love to the best coupons, deals and shopping suggestions I’ve seen.  (I should note that the number one way to be thrifty and green is to do without or to do with less. But even Compact people agree that there are some things — food, toiletries, medicines — that you really and truly do need. This list is about where to look when you really do *need* something!)

• The Whole Foods Grocery Store has a $5 off $25 coupon out right now, good until October 22.  This is like the motherload for couponers, as you can combine this with manufacturer coupons to get some great deals.  Go to the Whole Deal to download your PDF copy of the coupon. (That link also has more suggestions for saving money at Whole Foods.)

• The Money Saving Mom (aka the couponing goddess) had a great guest post this week from Project Organic Eating, all about how to save money on organic food.  I’ve already signed up for the three newsletters she recommends and am looking forward to my cache of coupons and easy seasonal recipes.  Be sure to click over to the POE blog as well, as owner Patricia Wooster has tons of money-saving posts designed for green living families.

• Organic Mania had a recap post this week of some of her best money-saving tips for eating organic and living green. I especially appreciated her post on the cheapest places to get organic milk.  I’ve been getting the Costco hormone-free label, which at $2.67/gallon is an incredible deal.

• Five Tips on Shopping the Farmer’s Markets from Eat Drink Better. Reading this post reminded me of a conversation I had with a new friend earlier this week.  She told me that she bought three peppers for $1.00 at our a local produce market.  Three peppers. For one dollar! I was floored.  I’m definitely checking it out next week.  The market is 17 miles round-trip, but with the price of gas dipping below $2.50/gallon (can you believe that?) it’s more than worth the drive! Especially if I “squirrel away my winter booty” like Eat Drink Better’s post suggests!

• And finally, here are 11 Ways to Save Money on Organic Food from the Tree Hugging Family. The post is a bit old in blogosphere terms (it’s from May), but her is advice is still totally current.  Except, of course, for her first tip, which is not to shop at Whole Foods.  I’m gonna say that given the $5 off coupon, you can skip that advice, at least from now through October 22.

As for shopping at stores like CVS and Walgreens, there are still green deals to be found.  The other day, for example, I stopped by Walgreens and picked up six boxes of Kashi’s Autumn Harvest squares, a favorite of both my husband and my sons.  Walgreens is running a 2/$5 special, with an added bonus that if you bought $15 worth of Kashi products, you would get a $5 register reward (which is like a $5 gift certificate to use the next time you shop at Walgreens.)

Even without coupons, I got six boxes of premium organic cereal for $1.67/box. If your family loves Kashi as much as we do, you can still stock up at Walgreens until Saturday night.  And, if you haven’t already used them, be sure to sign up at the Kashi website to download $6 worth of coupons. Combine these with the Walgreens sale prices and you can pick up six boxes of organic cereal for $.67/each!

Unfortunately, the kids’ chocolate milks came in these little mini jugs that were clearly going to spill all over my car.  So, I asked for cups with lids, and straws, and poured their milk into those.  (Of course, they still managed to spill all over themselves!) I was already feeling bad about all of this waste when my five-year old said to me, “Mom, will we recycle these cups or put them into the garbage bin?”

“I think the bin, because they have that waxy coating. But I’ll look it up.”

“Well, what about the lids?” he asked me.

“Probably the bin, too.”

He sighed heavily, a sigh laden with disappointment (in me? at the wastefulness of it all?).

Then my three-year old chimed in, “But we can recycle the straws, right Mommy?”

Actually probably not, but I love your thinking, kiddo!

Pushing the whole landfill guilt aside (and the HFCS guilt aside, too… why is it in EVERYTHING?), I realized just how green we’re being by practically never eating out.  We’re significantly reducing our garbage footprint by skipping out on the fast food world. I never really appreciated how much this budget-cutting decision was green not only for our wallets, but for our planet!

Are you inadvertantly green in any areas of your life?

In Israel, we drank bottled water because even when filtered, the water had a distinctly rotten egg flavor.  We originally had a bottled water service, which though more expensive, was appealing since the company reuses their jumbo-sized plastic containers.  I figured that had to be better for the environment than all those little bottles.

But then I noticed that the big bottles were plastic #7, which is known to contain BPA (Bisphenol-A, a nasty organic compound that is both a carcinogen and an estrogen disrputor, among other things.)  The litre-and-a-half bottles were plastic #5, which is considered a “safe” plastic (although I’m starting to wonder if there is such a thing), so I switched back to the smaller bottles. And recycled a couple of dozen every week.

When we moved back to America, the water mercifully smelled and tasted a lot “cleaner” — and frequent testing does indicate that the vast majority of drinking water in the States is both clean and safe.  So we were able to ditch our bottled water service and save a pretty penny in the process.

The truth is, though, that I still had a bit of a bottled water addiction — to those little half-litre size bottles that are oh-so convenient when you are out running around.  And Costco sells them so inexpensively, that it almost seemed unfrugal NOT to buy them.

Even still, I obviously knew that spending $.50 for a bottle of water was still 50 cents more expensive than drinking tap water.  Plus, I reasoned, a bin full of tiny little drinking bottles just couldn’t be good for the environment!

So like any other bad habit, I just quit buying those teeny bottles cold turkey. I forgot to bring the kids’ sippy cups a few times, and that generally entailed a lot “I”m thiiiiirsty” whining. The kids were completely unimpressed when I tried to show them how to make a cup out of their hands and drink some water from the bathroom sink. I quickly learned to remember to refill their sippy cups before we left the house.

Even if you go and invest in a BPA-free bottle for every member of your family (I’m putting the Kleen Kanteen on my Hanukkah wish-list), breaking the bottled water habit will save your household — and the planet — a good deal of green. Which is why it is my thrifty green tip this week.

Now as is the way with good Internet karma, I happened to read a post about this very same topic on No Impact Man (now there is a serious environmentalist!) just as I was composing this Thrifty Green post.  Apparently the New American Dream is asking all Americans to take the Break the Bottled Water habit pledge, which goes:

I pledge to Break the Bottled Water Habit by Thinking Outside the Bottle and using a reusable water bottle instead of buying bottled water. I also pledge to support the efforts of local officials to stop spending public funds on bottled water and prioritize strong public water systems over bottled water profits.

If you aren’t sure about taking the pledge, here are some facts about bottled water that may just push you over the edge:

• In 2006, Americans consumed 31.2 billion liters of bottled water. That’s an average of 167 bottles for every man, woman and child.

• Manufacturing those plastic bottles takes 900,000 tons of plastic.  It takes more petroleum to produce those bottles than it does to fuel 100,000 cars for a whole year.

• Bottling water is ironically very water-intensive.  According to the Pacific Institute, it takes three litres of water to produce just one litre of bottled water!

• 86% of water bottles are not recycled (I found this stat particularly unnerving).  It takes 700 years for a plastic bottle to even begin decomposing in a land fill.

• If just three times a week, you filled a glass of water from the tap rather than grabbing a bottle of water, you would save more than $230/year. (Run your own numbers to see how much you could save at the bottled water calculator.) Now I’m thinking $230 would buy an awful lot of organic produce!

When you decide to take the pledge, leave me a note in the comments section — and leave a link to your own blog post about taking the pledge. Come on guys…let’s take this thrifty and green campaign viral!