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Admit it. Going Green isn’t just a feel-good fad. It’s a way to reduce our environmental impact while saving some serious cash. Without further ado, eight picks from the brain trust that is both style conscious and energy saving:

1.    Simpletech [re] Drive External Hard Drive (500GB & 1TB)

• Auto on/off feature
• Casing made from Bamboo and recycled aluminum
• Most environmental friendly storage to date

2.    Samsung E200 ECO Phone

• Corn-based housing
• Recycled packaging
• First phone with entirely bioplastic case

3.    Belkin Conserve

• six remote controlled ‘switchable’ outlets = saving energy without bending over
• Two ‘always on’ outlets for the DVR or wireless router

4.    Vers 2x iPod Speaker Dock

• Beautiful wood bezel made from sustainable plantation lumber
• Zero environmentally hazardous materials
• Old-style class and simplicity befitting of your iPod

5.    Philips ECO TV

• Built-in light sensor automatically measures room’s ambient lighting and adjusts the television’s back light accordingly
• 42” LCD flat panel that sips power and saves rain forests

6.    Nokia 3110 Evolve

• Housing is bio-sourced materials that are 60% renewable
• AC charger beats Energy Star power usage standards by 94%

7.    iQua SUN BHS-603 Solar Powered BT Headset

• The world’s first solar powered Bluetooth headset, enough said

8.    Voltaic Laptop Bag

• Solar paneled for 4 watts of juice that is portable, quick, and safe
• Stroll from the train to your office = burning and renewing energy

If you are ever unfortunate enough to be upwind of the Agbobloshie dump in Accra, capital of the West African country of Ghana, you might want to wear a gas mask.  Will Ross, a BBC correspondent wrote a great piece earlier this month that shines a light on the practice of shipping e-waste to other countries. The BBC reports that Great clouds of acrid black smoke corrupt the air.  People are burning off the plastic coatings on computer cable to capture the copper.  Children maneuver through the dump looking to smash computer monitors to sell the metal inside them. It’s illegal, but unwanted computers from industrial countries arriving in Third World Countries are dumped, turning the water and earth into toxic swamps. Environmental journalist Mike Anane has been keeping tabs on this phenomenon.  Although the computers arriving in the Ghanese port of Tema are marked “usable second-hand goods,” Anane has found that only about 10 percent are functional.   “The rest go straight to Agbobloshie dump site and other dumps around the country where they contaminate ground water, surface water, the rivers and the streams.   And they all end up in the sea, and that’s where we get all the fish.” The United Nations estimates that 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste are produced yearly. And you know what – those e-dump mountains start one iPod, one computer, one cell phone at a time.  It starts with that Blackberry of yours that you don’t want anymore.  You might think, “I’m busy. If I throw the Blackberry into the trash, what difference will it make?” Multiply that one by hundreds and thousands of others, and the effect on the environment is tremendous. But now you have an alternative that’s just as easy as tossing your device into the trash.  You can send it to Gazelle.  We’ll promote the cycle of reuse by paying you for that gadget and reselling  it.  If your item is too old or in too poor condition for resale, we will make sure it is recycled responsibly—for free!

What does “responsible” mean?  Our recycling partners are based in the United States, and the items we send them to be broken down into parts do not leave the country.  And they do not end up in the Agbobloshie dump. You can make a difference and end what the environmental group Greenpeace calls “poisoning the poor.” And you might even make money doing it.  Be Green.  Get Green.  That’s Gazelle.

South by Southwest Interactive is an amazing event. In their own words:

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

We’ve thrown our hat in the ring to host a couple of panel sessions this year, but we need your help. Please take a moment to cast a vote for us on the SXSW Panel Picker site.

The first session is called Being Green on Your Own Terms. Reversing the trend of our deteriorating environment will take a sea change, but how much are people willing to sacrifice? This panel will explore and promote emerging services that make a positive contribution towards “going green” without asking consumers to radically change their lifestyle. Providing a practical way for individuals to each do their part towards a collectively huge outcome is what Gazelle is all about, so we’d be thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this discussion.

The second proposed session is a bit more business focused. It’s called Challenges and Solutions Surrounding Dynamic Pricing Structures. For anyone who asks “so, what happens to all the stuff I sell to you?”, this session will provide some tactical details about how we promote reuse with the best of the gadgets we buy.

Sound like something you’d be interested in? Then let the folks at SXSW know by voting today!

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.

We see a lot of products come through the doors here at Gazelle. Some of them are at the end of their useful life, and we shepherd them into the recycling process. At the risk of sounding corny, keeping these electronics out of landfills is awesome in both senses of the word.

More and more, however, we see things that are still pretty new. This is great. It means people are embracing reuse rather than keeping their old cell phones, and laptops in closets and drawers.

In the last couple of days, our first two 3G iPhones have come through. With all the hype surrounding the release of the new iPhone less than a month ago, this may have broken a speed record for reuse. It took a few months for us to get our first Air.

Makes you wonder, what are they upgrading to?…

Gazelle wants to change the world – one cell phone, one laptop, one iPod at a time.

It is our purpose – and our promise – to provide a practical, rewarding way for people to stop hanging onto all those old digital cameras and gaming systems that they no longer use, but can’t seem to find a way to let go of.

Too often when people think of recycling, they rush straight to smashing things into bits for parts.. We believe that reuse should always come first. If your GPS unit still works, why not keep it in circulation AND get paid for it? If reusing isn’t in the cards, then let us recycle that vintage camcorder. We think of it as reCommerce.

Yeah, we’re green. Green for you with dollars in your pocket. Green for the environment with fewer electronics being trashed.

It’s good to Gazelle. That’s our promise.