Drop an old computer at one of the recycling programs that have proliferated over the last couple of years, and you get a receipt, a slight feeling of having done the responsible thing, and very little visibility into what actually happens to the machine after that. Investigators who have followed the trail keep finding the same destination: shipping containers headed to processing yards in China, Ghana, and a handful of other countries where labor is cheap and environmental enforcement is close to absent.
What happens in those yards is not recycling in any sense a Western consumer would recognize. Workers, sometimes children, burn circuit boards over open fires to recover small amounts of gold and copper, break apart cathode ray tubes that release lead dust, and dump whatever has no resale value into open ground and waterways that people downstream also drink from.
The economics explain why this keeps happening, not excuse it. A processing yard in a country with real environmental regulation and real labor costs cannot compete on price with one that has neither, and a recycling program that quotes a low price to consumers is, more often than the industry likes to admit, quoting a price that only works because the actual dismantling happens somewhere none of those costs apply.
Which means the well-intentioned choice to hand over an old machine responsibly, rather than putting it in a bin, can end in the same landfill outcome anyway, just relocated to a country where nobody sees it happen and nobody has to answer for it.
Some recyclers do this properly, dismantling equipment domestically under real oversight, and they tend to charge more for that reason, because doing it correctly costs money that exporting the problem does not. The trouble is that nothing on a drop-off receipt distinguishes the two, and a consumer standing at a collection point with an old tower has no practical way to know which chain they have just handed their machine into.
The honest fix is a paper trail, verified rather than self-reported, that says where a given piece of equipment actually ended up rather than what a collection program claims. Until that exists, dropping something off responsibly and dropping it in a bin may be closer in outcome than anyone doing the dropping off wants to believe.