Online shopping with Dal flavour

Have you been looking for a great deal on mannequins? Searching for the perfect hospital gurney for those hard-to-buy-for names on your holiday shopping list? Or maybe you’re just after a new desk.

Whatever you’re hunting for, Dalhousie’s Surplus Disposal program may be the place to go when you come home empty-handed from the mall.

Operated by Dalhousie’s Procurement department, the Surplus Disposal program launched in October 2011. In addition to giving people in and outside the Dalhousie community a way to shop for reasonably-priced used items — from the ordinary to the exotic — the program has also minimized Dal’s environmental footprint and generated funds for university departments.

For those who don’t know how it works, here’s a breakdown: When departments are finished with pieces of furniture or equipment, they alert the Procurement team. Procurement then posts these items internally and externally (Kijiji), while also sending notice to email subscribers.

Using an online bid form, available on the Procurement site, internal and external customers can submit a bid within set window, usually a week or two. Priority goes to internal bidders who intend to reuse the item on-campus. If there are no internal bids, the best offer from the pool of external bidders — anyone who wants the item for personal use — wins out.

In the year since the Surplus Disposal program launched, 350 people and companies have signed up for email notifications. Items for sale have ranged from dental equipment, to a boat, to a giant cement cube made by Dal Engineering students.

Thankfully, you’re more likely to find something you can actually use.

“The vast majority of items are furniture-related office equipment,” says Mike Drane, director of procurement for Dal. “Tables, bookcases, filing cabinets, desks, dividers.”

Reducing waste

Surplus Disposal shoppers can find great value. In doing so, they make a valuable contribution to the environment by diverting items that might otherwise end up in a landfill.

According to Drane, only 134 of the 744 items posted in the past year have gone to landfill, or 18 per cent. Prior to the launch of the Surplus Disposal program, about 80 per cent of surplus items landed in the junk pile.

The desire to reduce waste was the inspiration for the program, and Drane is thrilled to see it having the intended effect.

“With the old process, we would redeploy less than 20 per cent of the items,” he says, referring to a previous era when only subscribers of Dal’s old Notice Digest newsletter even knew when surplus items were available.

In the past year, external buyers accounted for 367 of the items sold.

“Because we’ve opened this up externally, it gives us that much more opportunity.”

Shirley Sherman, a buyer in the Procurement department who handles the day-to-day operation of the Surplus Disposal program, agrees. She adds that the Procurement group has also been able to collaborate with Dal’s Office of Sustainability and Dalhousie Trucking in the implementation of the program.

“Trucking will not take anything to the landfill unless it goes through us first,” says Sherman. “Before we started this, Trucking was going to the landfill once or twice a week. Now they’re going maybe once a month.

“We’re saving a lot of money there.”

A bonus benefit

In fact, cost savings have been a pleasant secondary benefit of the Surplus Disposal program. Drane says the past year’s sales have generated $40,000 in revenue, with individual departments receiving the net proceeds from any items they put up for sale.

“In these tight economic times, [the revenue] offsets a little bit of [the departments’] expenses,” says Drane.

“The other thing is that, when we look at tables or desks or file cabinets, when they get redeployed throughout the university, that offsets purchases,” Drane says, pointing out that an item that might cost $500 at retail can cost a fraction of that price when purchased through a Surplus Disposal auction.

“There’s cost avoidance in the purchasing, and that’s a benefit to the institution as a whole.”

Drane pegs that value at about $75,000, proving that Surplus Disposal is a benefit to the university’s pocketbook, as well as the environment and the shopping lists of its customers.

Sherman sees even better things for Surplus Disposal as it heads into its second year. The Procurement department intends to implement the program at the Dalhousie Agricultural Campus in the near future, and the customer base is also expanding.

“We’ve sold items to (bidders in) Vancouver, Quebec City and Montreal,” she says. “It gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Surplus Disposal: A step-by-step guide for customers

Here’s how you can browse, bid on and buy items for sale through Surplus Disposal:

• Go to the Surplus Materials page on the Dalhousie Procurement website.
  
• If you want to be notified when items go up for sale, enter your email address as well as the security code that appears in the “Receive Notification of New Items by email” box.
• If you just want to browse, click “Current Items” to see what’s for sale right now.
• If you see something you want to bid on, click on “Purchase Instructions.” This page includes a link to the Surplus Bid Form.
  
• Download the Surplus Bid Form and fill it out. Remember – if you’re buying the item for personal use, your bid is considered an external bid.
• Email the form to surplus@dal.ca or fax it to 494-1534.