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Many shoppers know that taking a reusable bag to the grocery store cuts down on waste. But a few Potomac moms are hoping to take that idea to the next level by sending children back to school this year with reusable sandwich bags.

Potomac moms Kirsten Quigley and Cristina Bourelly, along with friend and Los Angeles-area graphic designer Jennifer Stoller, got the idea last year to launch a line of reusable lunch bags that would take the place of plastic zip bags.

"There's a lot of hype about bringing a tote to the grocery store, but that's just one kind of plastic bag," Quigley said.

With nine young children between the three, they started to take note of how many plastic sandwich bags they were using daily. Between lunches and snacks, it was sometimes up to 10 a day.

They thought about how much space the bags were taking up in landfills and they wondered out loud if there way another way to pack their kids' lunches.

"You can go to the grocery store and see this 40-year-old product on the shelf, but there was nothing side-by-side that offered you a great alternative," Quigley said.

So, they decided to come up with their own alternative. They developed a line of dishwasher-safe, reusable bags and dubbed them "Lunch Skins," and decided they would call their company 3 Green Moms.

Now, the products — which are sized to fit sandwiches and snack foods — are on sale through their Web site and businesses around the county and the country. They also sell the Lunch Skins at school fundraisers.

Waste from school lunches is a problem that federal agencies and school systems across the country have recognized. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average school lunch creates about 67 pounds of waste per school year, and an average-sized middle school creates more than 40,000 pounds of lunch waste a year. The EPA encourages students to pack a waste-free lunch by reusing cloth napkins, silverware and containers. Reducing the number of items in a school lunch that need to be thrown away, according to the EPA, can help prevent pollution, conserve natural resources and save energy.

In some school systems countrywide, efforts to initiate "waste-free" lunches have met with success.

The Lunch Skins, according to the three moms, are an easy way for parents and their children to practice being environmentally responsible at lunchtime. "It's not only about making big steps towards change, it's also about what we do in our everyday lives and making small changes," Bourelly said. "We want to give people the tools to make those changes, and it's easy and convenient."

The reusable sacks also provide a hands-on way for kids to practice the values of environmental stewardship they learn at school, they said.

"Our goal is to make Lunch Skins the go-to packaging for packing lunches," Quigley said. "Every time kids pick one up, they know that that's one less piece of plastic that's going into the landfill."

To learn more about 3 Green Moms and Lunch skins, visit www.3

greenmoms.com.