[Editor's Note: This article has been slightly edited to correct the name of the Government Accountability Office, which is no longer called the General Accounting Office.]

As with just about everything we cover at GreenBiz.com and our sister sites, 2008 was a wild year for green: as the calendar pages turned, the daily news went from a sort of business as usual in terms of green goals and commitments from companies to a sense of increased foreboding and gloom-and-doom predictions for the coming months.

However, our current economic crisis actually bodes better for green IT than just about any other sector, and at least some of our five biggest stories this year nicely illustrate just how key to the growth of green the idea of cost savings can be. As Executive Editor Preston Gralla wrote in a blog post earlier this month, the economic meltdown may end up being green IT's best friend.

Before we go any further, let me say that, as I looked through all of our coverage on GreenerComputing.com from 2008, what leaped out at me was not so much Five Big Stories as the five trends or ideas that most exemplify what happened in the computing world this past year. And so, without further ado, the list of Top Stories from 2008:

• Green Design Hits the Prime Time
• E-Waste: End of Life Takes On a Life of Its Own
• Companies Recognize the Growing Power of Energy Management
• Data Centers Get Continually Greener
• IT as a Solution to Our Biggest Environmental Problems

Green Design Hits the Prime Time

From chips to shells, monitors to power supplies, over the course of 2008 we saw companies announcing and implementing goals to lighten the impact of all types of computer electronics.

A good thumbnail sketch of what companies are doing with the design of their products is available in the Consumer Electronics Association's first industry-wide sustainability report. Among the highlights are companies developing more energy-efficient products, using recycled and easily recyclable materials to build their machines, and cutting back on materials used for packaging.

As with so much in the world of electronics, news from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., earned a possibly disproportional share of attention. In October, the company announced that new MacBook laptops would be 30 percent more energy efficient, use fewer harmful materials, less packaging, and meet two of the gold standards of green computing: the Energy Star 4.0 certification and EPEAT's gold-level rating.

Apple was far from the only company to make such announcements: Dell continued its goal to be the greenest electronics company around, adding LED displays, energy efficient computers and power-supplies to its ongoing list of green initiatives, and a Dell vice president lashed out at Apple for what he perceives as a lack of sincerity behind Apple's green claims.

Green computing certification plans continued to grow this year as well; the venerable Energy Star rating from the U.S. EPA got within striking distance of launching a category for servers (the Energy Star label currenly only covers desktops, laptops and monitors on the computing front), and the EPA continued work on developing an Energy Star rating for entire data centers. Meanwhile, the Green Electronics Council's EPEAT rating system hit the 1000th product certified earlier this year, a Sony Vaio laptop that scored a Gold-level rating.

Another notable launch in green-design certification schemes this year was the E.U.'s first E.U. Flower Eco Award for computing; the award went to ASUS for four of its green laptops. And in the also-ran category is Fujitsu Siemens, which decided that none of the labels on the market were strict enough for its standards, so it launched its own.

One of the key elements of a green computer plays into our next big trend: most of the certification schemes take into account both the toxic chemicals that are often used to build computers and how easy and safely they can be recycled when they're no longer useful. And as we saw especially in the last half of the year, e-waste became a big deal over the course of 2008.

Next: Dealing with the E-Waste Problem

Athlon chip photo CC-licensed by Flickr user rodrigo senna.