Someone should make a noncommercial website that allows people to post their collection. I bet there's enough people out there willing to share their cables for free just for the delight of having one of their cables being useful to someone for some reason

Some thrift stores will take them, if you have a good one nearby (I’ve been lucky here, but they’re rare). You can also put a note on your local freebie groups and someone might bite. In some cities you can leave them bagged outside your house with a note and they’ll be gone in hours. On some tech forum classifieds, people would give away cables and junk fans for the cost of the postage.

>I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.

I wouldn't be so sure. I bet there's more cables out there than functioning equipment, especially for older standards like VGA or PS/2.

It's ok to throw out junk.

> One thing that bothers me though (or an excuse my brain uses to justify it maybe) is that it feels so wasteful to dump so many cables that will probably end up in landfill when I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.

This prevents me from throwing away a lot of stuff. I can't stand the idea of this stuff just going into a landfill somewhere, adding to the world's pollution. I feel like every time I put something into the trash, I might as well be beating a baby seal with a baseball bat. I also put a (perhaps insane) amount of effort into reusing things and avoiding buying things in the first place, because I know eventually it will be polluting the world.

Often I just set up a folding table at the curb, and put my boxes of stuff there with a sign that says "free". Yes, I know the next person might throw it away, but somehow it's easier to ignore that fact.

IT Recyclers will at least sort them and resell them in bulk as raw materials. Sometimes. When they are allowed to.

things like old hdmi cables need to go, updated specs mean the old ones fundamentally don't work.

learn how and get the tools to strip wires and sell the metal for scrap when you have too much, do it right and better than recycling, you can sell it

I keep a lot of wires around because my interests and work require that, and I find great pleasure in being able to connect anything at a whim. Right now they're all pretty tidy, sorted by role into not-giant boxes on a shelf. I don't have too much any particular type, and every one I do have works with currently-used technology.

It wasn't always that way, though -- I used to collect and keep all of the cables. It was quite a burden.

10 years ago or so, I went through them all and sorted them. I got rid of hundreds of pounds of cables. Those that went away were all broadly useless to modern society, or duplicates, or both.

I did think about taking some to a thrift store but, I mean: I see the same used wires on the shelves there sometimes for months or years: People don't want them. And I wasn't about to landfill them.

So I decided to recycle them by selling them as scrap.

In my case, with the scrap yard near me: They offered me a much better price without connectors on the wires than with them. So I cut all the ends off, bagged up all those bits of insulated copper wire, and sold them by the pound. It took a fair bit of time to prep all that stuff for scrap, but meh: I made a rather decent hourly wage doing it and felt like I was working towards the right goal.

Since this transaction gave them value, I can be reasonably certain that they got made into something instead of just being dumped into a hole in the ground.

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If direct re-use is very important: You can sell them on eBay, I guess. There's buyers there. But then you're doing all of the things that selling cheap stuff on eBay requires and that sounds like an awful way to spend time.

Otherwise, the prospects are bad. Even at hamfest fleamarkets in Ohio, people don't usually bring in collections of old miscellaneous cables. A special programming cable for a Yaesu radio? Sure! 50 feet of LMR-400 coax? Why not.

Yet-another USB A-to-B printer cable? No, nobody wants that (we already have our own burdensome stash), and even if they do then nobody wants to scan through all of the old computer power cords and audio cables to find that printer cable any more than you want to sort it all out for for display and perusal.

If the money isn't important and the main goal is to avoid the landfill, then: Just put them on Craigslist or FB marketplace (or whatever regional variation works where you are) for free, in bulk. Someone will pick them up. Whether they think they're finding a pile of scrap to get some tax-free beer money from or some kind of hidden treasure doesn't really matter.

Or, in the right neighborhood: Put them in a pile on the curb so that people can see them. They'll simply disappear.

> If direct re-use is very important: You can sell them on eBay, I guess. There's buyers there. But then you're doing all of the things that selling cheap stuff on eBay requires and that sounds like an awful way to spend time.

Yea, I would love to get a few bucks each for all this crap, but eBay sucks as a small time seller. I've got to take some pictures of each thing, guess how much it's going to cost to ship (or list free shipping and eat the cost) post it, wait for it to sell (or for the auction to end), go buy a cardboard box or mailer for it, go buy packaging/stuffing to protect it, go buy packing tape to tape the box up, go to USPS, UPS or whatever, to finally mail it off, and then wonder if you're going to be hit by the nonzero probability that the buyer is a scammer and will cause a problem. Repeat for each little thing you want to sell.

I wish eBay was more like consignment. Ship them off a big box-of-stuff, they pay you a small amount for it, and then it's their problem to sell and distribute.