What hurts too is when during an annual cleaning action, perfectly good dev.boards, programmers, full reels and tubes of brand new components and whatever are just thrown into the bin.
I resisted the temptation to take all the reels with ceramic caps, diodes, transistors and MOSFETs because I figured flogging them all takes an eternity and is more trouble then they worth.
Perhaps, after talking to the powers that be, you could set aside the DEV boards etc and offer them to local schools or community EE oriented clubs
Of course I went dumpster diving
The score:
Microchip Pro mate II with two adapters
Atmel STK500 with AT90xxPWM adapter board
Keil ULogic mkI programmer
some ST programmer for likely the STM8? series
a couple of the now defunct Quantum Leaps touch sensor kits
Five LPC2148 boards from EmbeddedArtists
Two AT86RF212 plugin boards from a german vendor of which the name escapes me now
Tube of 9 brand new DL2416 intelligent dotmatrix LED display modules, currently about €28 at Farnell.
Fluke/Philips bench multimeter of which I know the current measurement function is broken
Metcal powersupply
I all bought this for €1