I don't think I've ever walked past trashcans and not wondered what would be inside. If I'm alone, sometimes I do take a peek. Some people throw out the most amazing stuff! My family has trash-picked 5 TV's and a working PS2 (poor kid) among countless bits and bobs and pieces of furniture. I love playing the mental game of "What could I make with that person's garbage?" Sometimes I just think about making a giant cardboard fort but sometimes I come up with interesting things out of it.
I know a guy that makes beer money selling stuff he finds in the trash on university campuses. In the UK, the law states that organisations have to throw out electronic waste in a special bin that is taken away by a special disposal company. So by each department there are these large boxes you can just rummage around in if you want. I've never heard of anyone getting in trouble for it. EDIT: This law is called WEEE. Ha ha ha.
Wow, I wish that law existed here... I bet my university throws out loads of stuff I could salvage and build into robots (totally not designed for world domination). Large institutions are huge boons for finding random free things. The German ministry of Education even threw out 190,000 euros worth of computers. Could you imagine finding hundreds of computers that work perfectly and just need a new HDD and OS?
Yeah, I suppose the issue for these institutions is that the red tape and labour costs associated with fixing up these computers exceeds the cost of buying new ones. Also, computer deprecate pretty quickly. It's a shame, but sometimes the economics of these things works out so that shit ends up getting wasted. I also wonder about making robots using this stuff, me and some other people have been thinking of starting a robotics society at our university. I am nearing the end of my penultimate year so time is of the essence. It's going to be hard finding people to join us if we haven't got a clear idea of what we're going to do. Something tells me some serious planning's going to happen this summer...
It's incredibly frightening when you factor in that most/some of these disposed electronics end up in developing countries where they get melted down for metals. Melting plastic and heavy metals without any protection is pretty horrific. I try to hang onto technology as best I can, reselling and reusing whenever possible. I think at this point every TV at my parent's house has an old computer hooked up as a media server. I wish you luck in starting the society! There are a lot of different options there from competitive groups that built autonomous subs/planes/cars/etc to people you just like to tinker with arduinos and such. At my university we have a society dedicated to building things, whatever the students want, so we've built a wind turbine (30 feet tall) and are starting on a hovercraft. If you're at any sort of technical institution I can't imagine it will be hard to find loads of interested people.
It's not only electronics. In many parts of the world burning trash is just what people do. One time I was at a little beer garden in Vietnam and my eyes started burning and watering and it was getting hard to breathe and there was this weird smell. I walked around the corner and this old man had a huge pile of styrofoam (polystyrene) and was in the process of throwing more gasoline on it to get it to burn faster. Didn't even finish my beer.
Yeah, my parents' house has loads of computers in various states of disassembly. I remember people used to be surprised when I'd say that we had about five computers. They're cheap as shit now, though. Oh well. I feel sort of inclined to keep them running, but the energy usage... I wonder if one could plot a graph showing negative environmental impact of disposing of old computers and getting a raspberry pi to replace them (more energy efficient) and keeping the old things running. It would be interesting to see where those two lines intersect. One other idea is to scrap the society idea (I will have a dissertation to write, I suspect it might be too high-maintenance) and join the local hackerspace. Especially because they'll have CNC machines and 3D printers... rubs hands together gleefully So many ideas, so little time.