By Geoff Davis Parenting books are adding chapters on green living. Here's a guide to some of our favorites:

Few products typify American consumerism as well as household cleaners. Capitalizing on our insecurities, manufacturers and marketers have transformed a mundane collection of products into over an $18 billion market of household helpers. We’re constantly told we’ll humiliate ourselves if our toilet bowls and counter tops don’t sparkle as well as our neighbors’ do.

We’ve all seen laundry detergents that contain something called optical brighteners. And while that may sound ideal for dirty clothes, these additives aren’t as helpful as they seem. Optical brighteners are chemicals that make fabrics seem brighter or whiter than they are. They remain behind on clean laundry as a coating of microscopic fluorescent particles. When invisible ultraviolet light hits these particles, they convert it into visible light to create an optical illusion that tricks the eye into thinking our clothes are super clean.

Hazards hidden in children’s toys have been all over the news lately.From lead in painted surfaces to phthalates in soft plastics, the average toy store is starting to look like an obstacle course to anxious parents. To help you navigate better, we’ve put together a guide to safer toy shopping: In general, avoid toys made in China. While it is hard to tell for sure whether a Chinese-made toy contains harmful ingredients, the recent flood of news reports suggests precaution is warranted.

You don’t need synthetic fertilizers or pesticides to keep your lawn healthy and beautiful. These products can actually harm your lawn by discouraging root growth, causing thatch buildup, and making your lawn more vulnerable to pests and drought. Worse yet, because these products are designed to kill things (insects and weeds), they are full of toxins that even when used as directed, have the potential to cause a wide range of health problems in humans and animals.

What do you really know about your make-up? Not much, as it turns out. Unlike food, there are few regulations that mandate independent safety testing of personal care and makeup ingredients.

The United States produces an average of 4.5 lbs. of trash per person per day. The Environmental Protection Agency says it breaks down as: • Paper (34.2%) • Yard Trimmings (13.1%) • Food Scraps (11.9%) • Plastics (11.8%) • Metals (7.6%) • Rubber, Leather, and Textiles (7.3%) • Glass (5.2%) • Wood (5.7% • Other Materials (3.4%)

Over her lifetime, the average woman in the U.S. will use more than 5,000 tampons. That’s a lot of cotton, and here are reasons why you want to use organic tampons instead of conventional brands. Manufacturers of conventional tampons use non-organic cotton, one of the most chemically intensive crops in the world. In the U.S., 25 % of all pesticides are sprayed on cotton fields, and the EPA has declared seven of the top 15 of these chemicals to be possible carcinogens.

Parents everywhere take great pains to choose only the gentlest and safest products for their little ones. But sometimes, contaminants can be created when certain ingredients break down after use, or combine with other ingredients. You probably won't find this level of detail on the product label. Here are some common baby product ingredients to avoid: The detergent diethanolamine, or DEA, can interact with nitrite, a common preservative, to become a precursor of the potent carcinogen nitrosamine.

According to Project Laundry List, about 35 billion loads of laundry are washed each year in the U.S. The average household washes about 50 pounds of laundry in 7.4 weekly loads, cleaning some 6,000 items annually. About half of all loads are done in warm water, 35% in cold, and 15% in hot. Some 90% of those loads are dried in a gas or electric dryer. TEACHERS: Click here to get a lesson plan for Earth Day That much laundry makes a big environmental impact. So what can we do to keep both our clothes and the environment clean? Try these ideas on for size: