The Green and Thrifty Intersection

Although it's common to regard environmentalists as all a bunch of hippie wackos, there's a strong congruence between the resource-conservation positions of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" and "Waste Not, Want Not." In fact, I've often observed that the environmentalists could have gotten a lot further with conservatives if they'd packaged their messages in terms of thrift and saving by avoiding excess instead of in terms that came across as Gaia-worship.

And while groups such as Freecycle were originally organized in order to keep usable goods out of the landfill, they can also be a great way to pick up things that still have plenty of use in them. In fact, many Freecyclers will use need as a criterion in deciding whom to give an item when they have multiple responses to an offer.