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Surplus
With many staff, faculty, and students returning to campus, the Surplus program facilitated the reuse of over 5,300 items in FY22, recirculating items back to UWM at near pre-COVID levels. While Surplus revenue from in-person and GovDeals sales were down, partially due to operating without a full-time staff member part of the year, $75,176 in revenue was sent back to other departments. FY22 was also a banner year for scrap metal! Surplus more than doubled its record weight and more than tripled its record revenue with $30,984 in scrap revenue. This was due to two key factors: 1) record volumes of surplus due to various remodeling projects across campus paired with 2) high prices for metal commodities across the year. Donations to nonprofits and other government agencies were another notable success in FY22.
The year presented challenges for staff to work through: the continued impacts of COVID, staffing shortages (shout out to student employees who managed Surplus from Apr21–Nov21), and huge influxes of surplus coming from the Union, Engineering, Mellencamp, and Northwest Quad remodeling projects. Additionally, UWM’s IT department changed how they process used computers on campus, affecting Surplus’s ability to resell them to the public. The IT program now reuses old computers internally and sends older, outdated, or broken ones to Surplus. While Surplus occasionally offers computer sales, they will no longer constitute a substantial portion of Surplus revenue. The Surplus team must develop creative ways to compensate.
