It's time to part with all those cables I might have needed...
9I’m throwing them all away. I don’t want to burden Good Will with a 4 foot HDMI to DVI cable, or all of my phone wire.
I am starting the process of moving and going though all the crap that is too valuable to throw away but worthless to me. I’ve got old DSL/ outdated Cable Modems, Guitar Hero controllers, USB 1.1 cables, phone wire, old coffee makers – and a lot of those nice neoprene cases for devices I’ve never had.
I’ve kept that stuff for years with out using it – but still thinking there will be a use for it. This must be how hoarders feel.
I know it’s bad for the environment and all that – but the world needs more landfill to counteract rising sea levels.
Do you guys have a stash of crap, what’s in it?
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Why not Goodwill or the Salvation Army or similar?
The ones around here recycle many items, sell others to bulk resellers, donate others to charities that can use them - they are one of the best places to hand this stuff over, esp old electronics, and see it’s recycled or passed along properly. They have experts and personnel to do this full time. On electronics they make money on a lot of it, passing it along to companies that resell in bulk to China for recycling.
Radio Shack and Best Buy might also do this.
Or Craigslist.
Have you checked Freecycle to see if there is a group in your area? I’ve freecycled lots of old electronics and connectors that I thought no one would use. Some people actually have uses for them, and some others strip them down for component parts and recycle the rest. I freecycle just about everything except hard drives, which I open and break. The shell is then recycled.
I was looking for the power supply for an old laptop I finally got around to fix and found this:
Remember these things? I found it among my SCSI stuff.
@Mehrocco_Mole I’ve got one in the closet.
@Mehrocco_Mole you can’t even donate that stuff anymore!
If it’s old stuff, here’s what’s NOT to do:
Don’t call charities or libraries to give it away. Most of them don’t want it. My wife’s a library director. Please do not be the guy who takes your big tube monitor, complete with VGA cables, to the local library. They don’t want it. If they’re like my wife’s small library, they don’t have the manpower to process it, because they’re dealing with your neighbor’s moldy National Geographic collection that they didn’t want either (except the new guy who didn’t know the policy took them accidentally).
Unless it’s an organization that deals with old stuff, like a computer museum, they don’t want it. You’re just driving them nuts, and they have to pay someone to haul it away. Public, non-specialist libraries want stuff the community wants, like new laptops and wi-fi and best sellers and 3D printers. They don’t want your USB 2.0 cables, your pre-iPhone cell phone, or your TI-99/4A.
I feel your pain, though. I couldn’t get ANYONE to take my old Sony Trinitron. Forget Freecycle or Craigslist or anything like that (unless you have an active group for that in your area- in my neck of NJ, there doesn’t seem to be enough interest). Find out where you can recycle old electronics in your town and just take it there. Otherwise, it’ll just clutter up your place, and you’ll end up being on a 2nd-rate Hoarders show someday.
@wishlish
I loved my TI-99! Finally threw it out a couple months ago.
I bought such a cable at a thrift store because my monitor is too old to have HDMI.
Donate it.
We just sold our house and when I was clearing out my ‘junque’ I collected 6 HUGE boxes of cables, old hard drive enclosures, broken video game consoles, non-functional laptops, TV, video and audio dongles of one form or another.
I put an ad on the List of Craig as “free to good home” to any like-minded putterer and had dozens of responses within the hour.
I feel great about it: The guy I gave it to was able to build a laptop for his son, and resurrected the XBox so they could play games and had a ton of uses for the rest in his side-business repairing electronics stuff.
PS: Since then, I can’t count how many times I’ve thought, “Oh, I have something in my workshop to fix that… oh… :-(”
Freecycle is great or try that Marketplace thing if you’re on Facebook. I had a decent sized box of wires and cords for who knows what and someone bought it for $5.
I just went through a similar exercise. I sorted out the pile and ended up with about 2/3 recycle, 1/3 donate.
If you were hoarding it “just in case” there is a chance it’s still useful to someone. Maybe.
A cable with HDMI on one end is still quite useful; e.g., person with old computer gets new monitor. DVI-DVI cable? recycle. VGA-VGA cable? Maybe.
@danpritts
That why perhaps let Goodwill sort it out. they know exactly what the recycle or resale demand is on everything.