What do you do with hardware when you just can't get rid of it? [closed]

So you've gone through the motions of trying to properly dispose of your old [ancient] hardware but nobody will take it. You don't want to let it sit and not rot in a landfill somewhere. There isn't a place in the world that will take it off of your hands. What do you do with it?

We allowed the IT folks to take out some frustrations "Office Space" style. It was a lot of fun and really raised morale.

I know you mean well, and sorry to pile on your bad day, but this is a serious problem. The proper term for your old equipment is e-waste.

Unfortunately even if you can find some gullible souls to take it of your hands it will eventually make it to the poorest in the world to be bashed into pieces with stone age tools for the valuable elements it contains and leave behind a toxic landfill.

To everyone saying give it to some non-profit place I'd just like to say I really hate it when people bring their old crap to us.

I do the IT for a non-profit, one that has been mentioned here already and while we don't need to compute pi to the 4 billionth number, please don't think we'll take any old crap. I know I don't speak for all of us, but I hate it when people drop off an old computer that turns out to be a PIII POS, oh it works great they say. Yeah ummmmm our current oldest computer is a P4 and its being replaced next week. If its too old for you to run your office applications on, then its likely too old for us as well. Its an office, we have work to do and we still need to do it effectively.

We have 30 computers and 3 servers, of those we have a 4 year life cycle plan on the work stations and 5 on the servers, and if needed we can drag that out a little if we can't quite replace them all when expected. This allows us to plan and budget for replacement. Because we've done it right the computer system has become a necessity and requirement, especially since we're 24/7 and the night shift uses email to maintain effective communications with the day shift & management. We'd rather have fewer good computers then more that just create problems.

Management used to think it was a good idea to take the used stuff, until it was shown to them how many hours were spent wasted with down equipment, slow equipment, lost work, etc buy using used/old equipment. When you can get a NEW low end workstation (and business class vostro not home) for $350 from Dell, thats less then $100 year per computer.

We don't even try and give ours away when we replace them, we just dispose of them. Luckly enough for us, the local city takes electronics (for proper recycling) for free from residental, so I slowly discard them over a period of 6 months. If it truly is a family that can use it, then sure, but otherwise disposing of it properly ensures that it was done right, rather then risking the next person just trashing it.