I learned that Goodwill, in partnership with Dell, will take your old computer, send it back to their corporate office, disassemble it, and recycle the components, mostly for the metals.
I have at least two old computers here and I really don’t want to hook them up to the internet, get them working with a modern browser (if even possible) and download and run software to wipe out the hard drive before I give them away. I don’t want to hook them up and turn them on at all! They never had anything very interesting on them anyway, private-information-wise, so I want to turn them over as is.
This is good enough for me!
Jane's Lessons Learned 