The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that approximately 3 million tons of office furniture and furnishings are discarded each year. And more than 51 million computers were disposed of in 2010 according to the EPA. Many of these items are disposed when they still have usable life left in them.
Until recently, departmental property managers and others disposing of office equipment on the CU Boulder campus had few options for exchanging university-owned property that was no longer needed. Much of this equipment ended up being trashed or recycled despite having remaining life that could benefit another campus department. That is hopefully about to change with the offering of a new service called Buff Surplus.
Buff Surplus is a website tool that facilitates the exchange and re-use of surplus property between campus departments (lab equipment, furniture, computers, etc.). You could think of it as a CU Boulder version of Craigslist for campus property. By using the site, faculty and staff can help save funding, reduce waste on campus, maximize property utilization and avoid premature disposal of property.
Joe Workman, an IT professional with Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and a project member on the Buff Surplus team, recalls how he and a former co-worker spent a summer rounding up close to 100 computers that were destined for disposal so that they could update the computers in the EBIO labs. “It was clear there was a need for a better way to exchange campus property with other departments,” said Joe.
So he and others contacted Kathy Ramirez-Aguilar with CU Green Labs to see if there was something that could be done to make exchanging campus property more efficient and widespread. Kathy said the need was so great for something like Buff Surplus that it was easy to find people to contribute toward the development of of the site. In addition to CU Green Labs and EBIO, other departments that partnered on the project included the Campus Controller’s Office, the Office of Contracts and Grants, Environmental Health & Safety, the Office of Information Technology, Integrative Physiology, CU Recycling, Facilities Management, the Environmental Center, and ASSETT. “It’s been such a great example of collaboration on our campus,” said Kathy.
OIT’s part in the project didn’t just involve the typical hosting of servers for the site. Although OIT does host the server for Buff Surplus, OIT’s involvement included guiding project members through project and vendor selection processes, and integrating the service with the campus identity manager service. OIT also worked closely with Joe and Eric Heltne, a Professional Research Assistant in Integrative Physiology, to develop and implement the solution. Working through these processes together helped the project group better refine their project scope and identify a service owner, ensuring a more successful rollout of the service.
“Lonnie (Francescatti) helped us focus in on what we needed to do for the first launch," said Kathy. "We absolutely needed that to start, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it.” she said.
Faculty and staff can add everything from office furniture to computer equipment to Buff Surplus. In fact one department even listed some no-longer needed paper on the site. Items will remain on the site for three weeks, unless a department requests that an item stay on the site longer. If the item goes unclaimed, the department can go through the typical process to dispose of the item.
The Buff Surplus site was made possible by funding through the Innovation Seed Grant. The Buff Surplus team is holding a series of lunchtime presentations for faculty and staff to learn more about the service.
