It's just all low priced crap.
Your low price crap can be be sold as medium price scrap, there are several scrap yards around College Station (and anywhere USA) that accept copper wire, ferrous and non ferrous metals in small quantities.
Insulated copper wire goes for around a dollar a pound, snip the XLRs off broken mic cords and you might get $100 for your trip to the yard. The used XLRs may net something like a dime a pound.
My perfectly working ADAT tape recorders ended up at the scrapyard after I waited to long to sell them..
Not much money, but you can feel better about it than sending the junk to a land fill.
Art