C&EN: "What happens to old scientific instruments?"

Ian Lightcap had a problem. The core facility director at the University of Notre Dame had a lot of aging equipment on his hands and a plan to upgrade it—but no plan for what to do with the old instruments after the new ones came in.

Take a high-resolution X-ray diffractometer, used for characterization of new crystalline materials, for example. When it was purchased in 2016, it was worth $275,000. But now, with its optical alignment and therefore its accuracy slipping, it was taking up space that Lightcap needed for a newer, more accurate model.

But the university didn’t want the older machine to end up in a landfill. The instrument had been a big capital investment. Surely it still had value to someone—somewhere. Didn’t it?

This is a really fun article, and something that covers an important secondary market (scientific equipment.)