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

>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.

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.

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

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.

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