Things nobody wants (pushbutton landline phones)

Way back in the the early 2000's, I helped organize a summer residential workshop in the college dorms. This was before everyone traveled with cell phones, and the usual dorm phones provided to students were stored away for the summer.  So we bought about 20 landline phones for our workshop participants to use.  We used these for all six years of the workshop.

Since I've recently retired, I was helping our new-ish department coordinator clean out the storage areas in the department and came across this box of phones.  

Corded landlines phones, in excellent condition.
Not like anyone cares, though.

One the one hand, they're in great condition: they've been stored away in ziploc bags, so they're clean -- no dust. They're all pushbutton, hardly ever used. They can go on a table or be installed on a wall.

On the other hand, no one wants them.  In particular, these people don't want them:

• The Facilities & Operations folks at our college refused the phones when I offered.  I figured F&O got first shot, since the phones were bought with grant money for a program on our college campus. But they basically said, "Ha, ha, ha; no."
• Habitat Restore said no.  (Really? I figured the local Amish/Mennonite population might be potential customers, but the guy at the donation drop-off said, no, they all use cell phones).
• Posting them on Freecycle netted only one person who was interested, who took three of the phones. 

Phones feeling unwanted.

I've just finished reading the book "Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of your Trash", which has an entire chapter devoted to discarded cell phones that go to Ghana for reprocessing/burning/dumping, and of course I didn't need to be reminded of how our throwaway culture is degrading our planet and our communities.  These landline phones, from a different era, were designed for much longer lives. (Could you imagine using the same cell phone during 6 years of workshops? Or pulling them out of a box a quarter century later and having them be just as functional as they were when you bought them?). 

The sad irony is that our throwaway cellphone culture has now made these other, durable phones worthless.  And, a quarter century later, I see even more than I did back then how these objects are, in fact, worse than worthless.  They're conglomerations of plastic with possibly useful metal pieces that are hidden away inside, inaccessible for simple reuse/recycling.  

So, while I try to find places where these phones would actually be used -- possibly even helping to avert a new purchase for someone -- I'm starting to switch my head over into thinking about how to dispose of them in the least environmentally irresponsible way.