Laboratory equipment is a valuable asset. Quality equipment comes at a significant cost, and you want to be sure to return as much value from that initial investment as possible as the years go by. When you wind up with surplus laboratory equipment for one reason or another, it is important to have a plan.
Fortunately, there are a variety of options at your disposal in this situation. Depending on the specifics of your operation and the equipment you have available, one of the options listed below may be able to help.
Put the Equipment Back to Use
For a small lab, it is easy to keep track of available equipment. If you run a small lab, you already know what you have available, and you know what you don’t need. But what about larger operations? If you are part of a large company which owns millions of dollars in laboratory equipment, it is very likely that one part of the company doesn’t know what another part possesses. This is a problem. What looks like surplus equipment in one place might actually be in demand in another part of the company.
The solution is to accurately track surplus equipment in a shared database. If everyone in the company knows what is available, it will be possible to purchase less new laboratory equipment overall. In this way, surplus lab equipment isn’t really surplus at all – it just needs to be put into the right hands in order to go back to work.
Marketing Valuable Assets
If a piece of used laboratory equipment truly no longer has a place in the company, it is wise to look to the second-hand market to recover some of your initial investment. However, this is only a viable plan when talking about valuable pieces. In most cases, selling lower cost items simply isn’t going to be worth the trouble, since there is a time cost associated with the process. Commonly, it is best to donate less expensive items to local organizations that can put them to good use.
As far as selling more valuable equipment, there are a few channels to consider. It may be best to run advertisements in local publications, or you just may decide to post information online about the items. Pricing is an important piece of the puzzle here as well, which means some time will need to be spent researching the fair market value of the items in question. If you can turn some of your costly pieces of equipment back into dollars, the overall equipment budget may look a lot better at the end of the year.
The worst thing you can do with lab laboratory equipment is to allow it to sit around and gather dust. Those are valuable assets sitting in the lab, so they should be put to use one way or another. Whether they can be redeployed in another part of the business, or simply given away locally to a worthy organization, be sure to take advantage of each individual asset to the greatest possible extent.