Sustainability Spotlight: UT Surplus REuse Store
At Austin Creative Reuse, we're about more than just arts and crafts. We promote like-minded organizations to reduce overlap, increase awareness of city resources, and make it as easy as possible for our community to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle!
This month, we are highlighting fellow reusers at the UT Surplus Property - a department of the University of Texas at Austin, that collects university items no longer being used, and finds them a new home. Crews pick up items every day on campus that have been sent to the surplus warehouse via a work order system. Third party movers are even enlisted throughout the year to bring items from large projects. UT Surplus Property then transfers the items to other organizations within the university system, public schools, and qualified assistance organizations.
Through good stewardship, UT Surplus Property promotes a sustainable campus and community and supports the university’s conservation goals. “A typical year would experience approximately 500 tons of material flowing through Surplus,” says Resource Recovery Manager, Robert Moddrell. He adds, “Surplus Property represents 9% of the total waste weight from all streams on campus including donation, sales, recycle, compost and landfill.” Through development work with student interns, the operation has reached Zero Waste with a 92% diversion rate! “Student Interns have been involved since the beginning [in 2017], participating in evaluation, data accumulation, business plan development, store setup, and stocking and operating the store each week,” says Moddrell. Our purpose is to repurpose.
All UT faculty and staff are invited to visit the Surplus Property warehouse at Building 45 to shop for items that can be taken back to campus for departmental use, encouraging re-circulation within the campus. The warehouse is open Fridays from 8AM-12PM and 1PM-4PM, no appointment is necessary for visits by UT faculty or staff. Students wishing to visit the warehouse must be accompanied by a faculty or staff member and are only permitted to use items for needs relevant to university departments.
The Surplus REuse Store is open to the public and operates using a sustainable model focused on recovering, repurposing, and reselling university assets, including furniture, athletic apparel and equipment, office supplies, antique items, fixtures, and more. The majority of the surplus items such as furniture and vehicles are sold through a weekly online auction process. There are also opportunities for public schools and qualified assistance organizations to select items such as office supplies, desks, chairs, bookcases, file cabinets, computers, monitors and keyboards to use for their designated purpose. Interested parties are welcome to contact them at surplus@austin.utexas.edu.
The Surplus REuse Store is open Thursdays 3pm to 7pm and Saturdays 8am to 12pm, and is located at PRC Building 30: 3300 Read Granberry Trl, Austin, TX 78758.
