HOW green is your computer? The answer is almost certainly not very.

All electronic gadgets are pretty bad for the environment, simply because they are made from plastic and metal, neither of which is particularly biodegradable.

Of course both can be recycled and by far the best thing to do with an old computer you no longer need is see if someone else can use it.

Your ageing 486 PC may not be any good to you any more, but a school might put it to good use as a file server, or perhaps running an e-mail gateway.

Schools almost invariably operate their own networks, so it's easy for them to add a new computer to the network and set it up to do one particular job like this.

Charities might also be able to put a computer to work grinding through their accounts, or printing out flyers.

And charity shops can simply sell them on to the public at a bargain price.

Before you think about donating your computer to anyone, make absolutely sure that none of your personal data is still on it.

Uninstall all the software you added, back up all your files to another computer or onto disks and wipe as much as you can of the files you created and changed while you used it.

Whatever you do, don't throw an old computer in a skip or take it to the rubbish dump. Someone, somewhere, is bound to have a use for it.

Look in your local newspaper, or at any local computer fair, for details of computer recyclers.

If that doesn't get you anywhere, visit www.uk-cr.org.uk, the home page of UK Computer Recycling. This organisation will pick up your old equipment from just about anywhere in the UK, free of charge. All you have to do is e-mail them with the details.