There Is No Away: Recycling Your Old Macs

As cool as Macs are, eventually they become obsolete or give up the the ghost. They also tend to acquire peripherals and accessories that also cease to function and/or become obsolete. This is an environmental concern because a landfill is no place for consumer electronics of any kind. Unless you prefer your drinking water with heavy metals.
Apple is very responsible in that if you buy a new computer you can check a box on the order form and they will send you a shipping label, and they will pay for shipping back and recycling your old Mac. Just one of those things that makes Mac ownership special.
Over the years, my garage has become filled with old Macs, monitors and accessories. And I do mean filled. So over the last couple weeks I’ve been deaccessioning. First I brought some old Macs (some still functioning) in to be used as props on the MacMost podcast set. Next, I cleaned off my G4 Tower, installed OS 10.3.4 and iLife on it and gave it to my niece and nephew to make music on. Cross them off my Christmas list.
Still I had five monitors, two boxes of old SCSI accessories,ADB tablets, mice, and keyboards, a couple old PC CPUs. I called a local electronics recycling center and found that they wanted over a hundred dollars to take my stuff away. So what to do? Freecycle.org to the rescue! Freecycle is an online service set up in many cities where you can go to a Yahoo group and post stuff you need to get rid of for free, and If somebody can use your stuff they email you, claim it, and pick it up. Woo-hoo!
So I posted a list of what I had left and found someone, who likes hacking together old computers and reselling them for cheap. My stuff is gone, I can see parts of my garage floor, and hopefully most of that stuff wont get thrown away, because there is no away.