@Marcus
Man, i don’t even want to go into my garage either. I think the Salvation Army will do pickups of big items that you might want to donate – like couches and desks and things. They all work for a tax write-off though. There have been a few pages I’ve come across like this that show some cool things to recycle. For anything worth donating though I’d definitely go that route instead.

@Brian
Thanks for the tips. I’ll definitely keep the stuff around until I find a place for it — no rush at least. Chances are there’s one right the corner I didn’t even know was there.

In fact, we buy used hardware from an Ebay-warehousing company occasionally and part of their business is collecting old systems and stripping the parts into giant piles of mobos, pci cards, etc. They can melt them down for the precious metals apparently. I was there a month ago poking around looking for shortie power cables for our new rack of servers and I came across this box… it was big enough for about 4 people to stand inside and about 4′ deep – filled to the top and then some with motherboards!

In the spirit of your composting article, definitely find a place to drop this off so it doesn’t wind up in the landfill. I’m faced with the same problem… lots of little components I’ve collected like gender benders, cables and other crap I need to slim down on.