Ian Lightcap had a problem. The core facility director at the University of Notre Dame had a lot of aging equipment on his hands and a plan to upgrade it—but no plan for what to do with the old instruments after the new ones came in.Take a high-resolution X-ray diffractometer, used for characterization of new crystalline materials, for example. When it was purchased in 2016, it was worth $275,000. But now, with its optical alignment and therefore its accuracy slipping, it was taking up space that Lightcap needed for a newer, more accurate model.But the university didn’t want the older machine to end up in a landfill. The instrument had been a big capital investment. Surely it still had value to someone—somewhere. Didn’t it?
This is a really fun article, and something that covers an important secondary market (scientific equipment.)
Rather fantastically, even if equipment is completely non-functional but still looks the part it is sought after for props in TV/films
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Ken Suslick of UIUC had a good story about this.
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Excerpt:
A week later, Gene calls and wants to rent equipment from the lab for the set. I explain to him that we do actually use this stuff and that it’s very expensive equipment. He sounds disappointed, and then it hits me — he doesn’t want equipment that works, only that looks like it works. And I know about this cavernous storage area in the basement of Roger Adams Lab that is full of old equipment — stuff too good to throw away at the time it was hauled down there, but of no use now. Things like ancient Infracord spectrophotometers, several dozen old black and white monitors, pre-war lathes (not sure which war), and so on. I suggest that maybe they’d like to see the "scientific equipment" in our storage area. His assistant returns to Champaign and with flashlights in hand we go spelunking into the depths of RAL. She photographs everything (again) and goes away.
When Gene calls next, about 48 hours later, I can practically hear him salivating over the phone. This room full of useless equipment turns out to be just the sort of place a set director dreams about (apparently set directors have very weird dreams). The question is, how do we sell this detritus of dead equipment to them? It turns out the university cannot sell equipment — no matter how useless — without rampant rivers of red tape. We can, however, declare old stuff surplus once it is of no further use, and simply take it off the books. Whether the junk then goes into a dumpster or into a truck, makes no difference.
So, with help from our business office manager, I arrange for a donation of $10,000 from 20th Century Fox to the school. I didn’t even ask a finder’s fee. They then send down a crew of four humongous guys and a moving van to match and spend a full day hauling away junk that we’ve been wondering how to get rid of for years!