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Despite what some people believe, recycling is not a new idea. No, recycling, in one form or another, has been around forever.

Centuries before the fall of Rome, bronze items were being retooled for different uses. The residue from fires was used to make bricks in pre-industrial Britain.

As early as 1690, the Rittenhouse Paper Co. of Philadelphia had a paper-recycling mill up and running. New York City’s sanitation commissioner, George Waring, mandated recycling – in 1895. Care to guess who enforced it? Teddy Roosevelt, then New York’s police commissioner.

Henry Ford, a man who believed in efficiency and thriftiness, set up a “disassembly line” so that old Model Ts could be used in the manufacture of new vehicles. (This was a guy who had the wood from shipping carts reused as floorboards.)

And there are a lot of other examples of conservation efforts. The public conscious, however, really got raised by the first Earth Day in 1970. This timing also probably also gave that hippie, tree-hugging perception to the movement. And in that same year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed.

From 1970 to today, enormous progress has been made in recycling as municipality after municipality handed out bins and ordered paper, cans and other materials be placed in them. In the mid-’80s, there was only one curbside recycling program as compared to more than 8,600 in 2006. That’s according to the EPA.

In 1980, recycling kept 15 million tons out of landfills. A couple of years ago, that figure had risen to 82 million. Curbside pickups, drop-off sites and buy-back centers have stopped 32 percent of our solid waste from ending up in landfills.

Okay, this is great, but stop all your clapping and whistling. Sixty-eight percent of our trash and garbage is still being dumped.

The massive Fresh Kill landfill, opened on Staten Island in 1948, closed 2001, was one of three man-made things that could be seen from outer space. The other two being the Great Wall of China and the American Interstate system (maybe spotting Fresh Kill dissuaded alien invaders from attacking.)

The discarding of electronics is, certainly, part of the problem. The Computer Takeback Campaign estimates that e-waste produces 20 to 50 metric tons worldwide and is the fastest growing solid waste. It has also found that 130 million cell phones get trashed a year. Now when you consider that there are some 2 billion people with cell phones now, the problem is only going to get worse.

Add in the 130,000 computers that ended up in the dumpster every day of 2005, of which almost 2 million tons were sent packing to landfills, we have a huge problem.

All of this has been to drive home the importance of recycling – and the purpose of Gazelle. We’re here to make it easy, practical, and rewarding for you to contribute to the solution.

reCommerce: it’s recycling for the 21st Century.