I have to say I am surprised this question keeps coming up. There are a number of charities which redistribute books either, as suggested above, in India, Africa etc. or within Europe to organizations for the homeless, womens shelters, refugee centres etc.:
Biblionef www.biblionef.nl/
Read to Grow www.readtogrow.nl
Amnesty International (find the local group and donate for their book sales)
Book Aid International www.bookaid.org
Books Behind Bars (USA) http://prisonpenpals.net/booksbehindbars.html
BookCrossing www.bookcrossing.com
Womens Prison Book Project (USA) www.prisonactivist.org/wpbp
Borderline Books www.borderlinebooks.org

This is just a few and there are certainly many small local organizations and individuals who will be collecting books for children and schools in Africa and other countries. Don't forget that in rural areas of e.g. South Africa, libraries are pretty much non-existent. Dumping books in landfill in the UK is not just wasteful, it's also incredibly lazy.

Amina Marix Evans, Leiden, Netherlands

If your organisation is not actually responsible for how councils operate their library service, what do you actually do? For what are you accountable? How much of your 'advice' has actually been used by councils in the past year? Do we believe you know what is best practice? Why?

Perkins, London,

Once again the MLA tries to have it both ways.

One the one hand, its well-paid bureaucrats want to make all these decrees, with innumerable conferences and meetings, about "best practice", "initiatives" etc., but, on the other, when the going gets hot - yet another story about good books in a skip en route to landfill - the MLA simply wrings those hands and says that it cannot interfere with "local democracy".

So where does that leave the string of "guidelines" to which councils keep saying that they must adhere for fear of losing the "bids" which they have always to be applying in hopes of maintaining a service which should simply be a given part of civilised life?

The dismaying thing about each council is that it always points to what others are doing (or, rather, not doing) rather than making a break for it and doing something better - such as providing more books - and leaving the other councils to be shamed into doing likewise.

Christopher Hawtree, Hove, Sussex, England