History of Thrift Week

Thrift Week sounds great to me and I believe we need to get back to the hard core basics of living within our means and community.

I decided to look into Thrift Week and find out what happened to it and led to it's demise.
Here's what I found.

Thrift week began pre World War 1 in 1961
"National Thrift Week" and sponsored primarily by the Young Men's Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.), the campaign became an annual celebration. National thrift Week began each year on January 17 the American apostle of thrifts' birthday, Benjamin Franklin. Expanding in the 1920's Thrift week gained supporters from over 50 groups including the Boy and Girl Scouts, Bankers, Farm Mortgage groups, Advertising Clubs, The US Postal Service and The Red Cross.

National Thrift Week was celebrated daily by specific principles and encouraged action each day.
Slogan, "For Success and Happiness."  

Monday: Have a Bank Account Day
Tuesday: Invest Safely Day
Wednesday; Carry Life Insurance Day 

Thursday: Keep a Budget Day
Friday: Pay Bills Promptly Day
Saturday: Own Your Home Day
Sunday: Share with Others Day.

Share with others Day was expanded into three pie charts:
“Mr. Tightwad’s Dollar,”
“Mr. Spendthrift’s Dollar,” 
“Mr. Thrifty’s Dollar.”
Mr. Tightwad and Mr. Spendthrift pie only allotted 1 percent to giving, Mr. Thrifty allotted 10 percent because he had more to give.

These principles were meant to cultivate responsible consumerism and civic progress. Rather than self-denial, the goal was self-control. The word, "thrift," finds its root in the phrase "to thrive".
Thrift is thriving because, in the end, the thrifty person will have more resources than the spendthrift—which thrift leaders believed was important not only for one’s personal flourishing, but for societal flourishing as well. 

Finally, thrift is thriving because thrift is not only wise use of money,  “intelligent use of health, time, and property of all kinds, including money.” In a school educational guide called "Thrift and Conservation"  thrift educators boasted that in 1917, schoolchildren in Los Angeles cultivated 90 vacant city lots, and more than 14,000 tended 900 acres of home gardens. As a result, they said, “Children are trained in habits of industry and thrift, and the spirit of cooperation is developed.” For these thrift educators, conserving natural resources was an intrinsic part of the thrift ethic: Because we hold all our resources in trust, the school guide noted, “it is our duty to guard our trust faithfully and to pass it on as little impaired by our use of it as possible.”

Special  events, parades, programs were the rage within budget but slowly fizzled out with more wars, economic downturns and cultural changes and lack of sponsorship until it completely disappeared in 1966. Arguably, thrift was replaced for the next forty years by consumerism and easy credit and our reversion back to thrift is one out of necessity.

How about starting our own thrift movement, emphasizing hard work, wise use of money, generosity, and conservation? As we work our way out of this Recession, the advice from nearly a century ago rings just as true for today: “Get the thrift habit.”Spending as we have seen does not necessarily stimulate the economy, as we are experiencing today.

Taking control back into our own hands and responsibility and out of investment bankers and speculation investors will go a long way to create sound communities and healthy solid/paid for homes and reduce waste everywhere.

Six Tenets of Zero Waste

1.    Smart Design
2.    Producer Responsibility
3.    Community Investment
4.    End of Taxpayer Subsidies
5.    Local Markets and Jobs
6.    Transparency

Introduction: As consumers, when we purchase items, we vote with every dollar we spend. If cheap is all we look for on the price tag then we pay later with our tax dollars cleaning up water, land and air that did not need to be polluted from the start. We pay through poor health and medical bills.

Cheap today just means pay much more later in taxes, or health, or inaction due to lack of funds.

Paying it forward is in the long run the least expensive manner to shop by. No toxins, pesticides or fungicides in my food processing means no watershed clean-up, no elimination of beneficial insects or depleted soils later and no toxins in my body from eating. No lead in my child's toys means more to me than a dollar or two. A car returned to the manufacturer instead of the junk yard means fewer materials and chemicals in the cars manufacturing so it can be reused again to make more cars or another product.

To encourage manufacturers and government to implement clean green products that will not harm us, our children or the environment we need to consider the tenets of zero waste in each item we purchase until it becomes the norm in manufacturing.

The really crazy thing is this is already happening in Europe and has been for over a decade. Companies here in the US that operate in the European Union already practice these tenets because they have to by law. They don’t do it here because we are not telling them we want it. We just accept what they give us. Remember you vote with every dollar you spend.

What exactly is Zero Waste?
Specifically, Zero Waste has six basic tenets:

1.    Smart Design. Redesign involves smart planning to limit the resources consumed in producing a product, in its totality, before manufacturing begins. Analyzing waste throughout the process and eliminating it is fundamental. Instead of using virgin materials recovered materials are priority through reuse, repurposing and recycling. All products are designed to be environmentally benign if not beneficial, and packaging is returned to the cycle (not landfilled) or compostable.

2.    Producer Responsibility. Manufacturers are held responsible for the waste and environmental impact their product and packaging creates, rather than passing that responsibility on to the consumer. The end result is that manufacturers redesign products to reduce materials consumption and facilitate reuse, recovery and recycling.

3.    Community Investment. Rather than using the tax base to build new landfills and incinerators, communities invest in new facilities designed to take the place of a landfill or incinerator. Combined with social policies and market signals, the technological advances can easily support the diversion of almost all of society's discards and create a broader job market.

4.    Taxpayer Subsidies would end for wasteful, polluting industries. Manufacturers use virgin resources for raw material partly because tax subsidies and other social policies make this a cheaper and easier alternative than using recycled or recovered materials. This is the beginning of the pollution, energy consumption and environmental destruction chain. Additional public subsidies exist to keep "disposal" costs through landfills and incinerators artificially low by not assigning significant economic penalties to the harmful emissions produced by these facilities. Properly allotted taxes to recover these “externalized” expenses would have an immediate impact.

5.    Local markets and jobs. Creating a new local market from discards, creating jobs and new business opportunities. Wasting materials in a landfill or incinerator also wastes business opportunities that could be created if those resources were preserved. Per-ton, sorting and processing recyclables alone sustains ten times more jobs than landfilling or incineration. Each recycling step a community takes locally means more jobs, more business expenditures on supplies and services, and more money circulating in the local economy through spending and tax payments. Sending our recycling overseas, while cleaner and simpler, removes these opportunities and is environmentally unmonitored.

6.   Transparency. In order to be believable, accountable and to adjust to changes in technology and perception in real time we need a sixth tenet of zero waste and that is transparency. This can help identify true innovators and socially responsible acting industries from their green washing competition who are trying to look good, and possibly mean well, but taking the cheap way around their true actions. If an incinerator claims to not pollute and be better for the community we need to be able to measure the pollutants released and energy consumed in real time, not years later, we need soil samples before incineration and after, often. If a company claims to be a green innovator we need to see the totality of their commitment, not just one or two green buildings out of thousands around the world.