Our parents' Depression-era wisdom is all the rage these days, though it might pain some of us boomers to admit it.

Their old-fashioned "Waste not, want not" way of living has been repackaged -- how "green!" -- for our hipper times as the mantra of the environmentally conscious: "Reduce, reuse, recycle."

This way of thinking is so popular now that it's even stirred up the area of American life most impervious to change -- local government.

These days, from Pittsburgh's East Hills to Moon, business, civic and government leaders are asking themselves the same question my mom apparently asks of every item she encounters: "What else can we do with this thing?"

Everything at our house had a second life, and maybe a third or fourth. Mom collected each day's grapefruit rinds, egg shells and coffee grounds to compost in the vegetable garden.

Every piece of foil was used over and over until it lay in shreds. There was a drawer just for twist-ties and rubber bands.

Once Mom even filled an old stocking foot with the remaining bits of dozens of bars of soap and tried to use the contraption as a kind of sudsy loofah. (I think this was her only recycling failure.)

We kids used to roll our eyes at our mom's parsimonious ways, but she's having the last laugh, as pretty much the whole country, including her children, embraces this kind of stewardship.

Local leaders are faced, of course, with recycling challenges much bigger than a piece of aluminum foil. Their challenges can be measured in acres, and the competing interests they have to juggle are a lot more strident than a few snippy teenagers.

Moon officials are gingerly considering a path already being trod, successfully, by East Hills -- the redevelopment of an old, empty shopping center. The sites have nearly identical names, and both involve a new Wal-Mart store.

At East Hills Shopping Center, redevelopment was spearheaded by a megachurch, Petra International Ministries, and their effort to secure Wal-Mart for the derelict site was an arduous process. Store officials persuaded city and county governments to spend millions of dollars to fight crime and housing blight before they would agree to invest in the area.

Through a church's vision, however, not just a shopping center, but an entire community, is being given fresh purpose.

Moon might as well be a million miles away instead of just on the other side of the county. Although this municipality is old enough to have a blighted shopping strip or two, it is vibrant and growing, with the brisk traffic you'd expect.

It's also located close enough to the Robinson retail mecca for officials to think twice before giving any retailer a go-ahead to redevelop the old West Hills Shopping Center.

Authorities are concerned about traffic congestion, and that's reasonable, but chances are that any redeveloper popular enough to warrant a Wal-Mart-sized investment is going to draw consumers in pretty big numbers.

Whoever the eventual developer turns out to be, the impulse is good: Use the infrastructure already in place and recycle the resources already invested, rather than allowing one more hill to be shorn of trees and its top chopped off to make way for yet another retail site. Sound familiar? Kilbuck? Ohio Township? All of Robinson?

Kudos to Wal-Mart for abandoning this shear-and-level approach to local woodlands, in favor of a suburban-eyesore recycling strategy. They've talked about doing the same thing on McKnight Road in Ross, but the same traffic concerns arise, as would gas consumption, wasted time and irked commuters.

The gnarled problems of repurposing huge commercial tracts make smaller, eco-friendly measures a smile-inducing relief -- things such as the occasional municipal windmill or the ubiquitous, brightly colored Abitibi paper bins.

Green Tree officials are launching a study to see whether it's feasible to install a windmill in the borough park. It would generate electricity for the park's rest rooms, concession stands and parking lot and ballfield lights.

A new windmill in Economy, Beaver County, is reportedly generating less electricity than hoped, but Green Tree officials, familiar with their park's windy soccer fields, are hoping their study gives them a green light for their green impulse.

Looking for the best site for a windmill seems only slightly less involved than Martha Stewart's quest to harness wind and solar power to dry her fabulous bed linens.

Seriously, when Martha Stewart shows America the very best way to put up a laundry line with the very best hardware attached to the sturdiest trees on her swanky Connecticut property, then you know my mom's money-saving ways have gone upscale and "green."

Darn it -- my parents are right, again.