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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

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.

Samsung has announced a new environmentally friendly version of the E200 handset at the Samsung Olympic event in Beijing. The new 9.9mm slim E200 ECO features a 1.3 megapixel camera with media playback capabilities. The external case of the phone, in appropriate green color, is made of bioplastic (extracted from plant material like corn) instead of polycarbonate plastic, which reduces the CO2 burden of producing the phone. It’s also packaged in a uncoated recycled paper box. Samsung is showing great effort in going green, while producing stylish and functional handsets.

This is fantastic. With manufacturers like Samsung concentrate on eco-friendly innovation like this, and Gazelle providing a practical, rewarding way for people to dispose of the gadgets they are no longer using, we can make a dent in e-waste.

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?…