"Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

So I saw an headline in The Oregonian newspaper this morning reporting: “Oregonians sending less to landfills in economic downturn.” It caught my eye, as most headlines are designed to do. I read on…: “It's because there's less garbage -- likely the result of slowdowns in consumer spending, consumption and manufacturing.”

And that’s about where I stopped reading because it got me thinking about something I would hope is common sense. That is, it just seems to make sense that – in bad economic times, as well as good – we should seek to repair broken things (if feasible) or reuse old things.

I think of some well-used pants of mine that had a tear on the pocket. Rather than throwing it out and buying a new pair of pants, I sewed it. (Granted, my sewing skills are quite weak, but the Boy Scouts did teach me some basics.) And, instead of throwing out my old shirt, my wife suggested we use it as a rag.

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” is an old saying, and it became a saying at some point because it had value. I think it still does.

If I continued reading the article in the newspaper, I’m sure it would say that rather than buying a new dvd player, people are taking their old ones into the repair shop…or just doing with out it for a while. Isn’t this something we could or should be doing in good economic times as well?

Call it thrift, conservation, recycling, or economic survival. Put whatever label on it that is politically comfortable for you. Regardless of what you call it, it’s wise.