We determine conservation laws of the generalized KdV equation of time dependent variable coefficients of the linear damping and dispersion. The underlying equation is not derivable from a variational principle and hence one cannot use Noether’s theorem here to construct conservation laws as there is no Lagrangian. However, we show that by utilizing the new conservation theorem and the partial Lagrangian approach one can construct a number of local and nonlocal conservation laws for the underlying equation.