What Happened When We Put a Price on Our Own Scrap Decision
Reading this because you are specifying, buying or selling containers? Send the details and a grader answers in writing, usually the same business day.
The fabrication shop had been open three years and the reuse rate had stalled. The binding constraint was not capability but the default: scrap was the path of least resistance at the end of a shift. A written four-question review by a second grader changed that and recovered about 11% of the scrap-routed stream.
I have been grading on this pad for nine years and the most useful thing I have learned about it has nothing to do with plastic.
Between 2020 and 2022 our reuse rate sat at 86 to 88% and would not move. We had the wash line. We had the rebottling bench. We had a fabrication shop with a heated-blade jig and a welding bay. Every tool needed to save a marginal unit was inside the building and had been for three years.
The rate stalled anyway, and working out why was uncomfortable.
What a grading decision actually feels like
A grader works through units at about four minutes each. Most are easy — wash it, test it, grade it, move on. Perhaps one in eight is genuinely marginal: a bottle with crazing that passed the air test, a cage that is racked but maybe jig-recoverable, a bottle with a destroyed boss in a perfect frame.
Each of those marginal units needs a decision, and the decisions have very different costs to the person making them.
| Route | Effort to initiate |
|---|---|
| Scrap | One mark on a tag. Done. |
| Wash again | Re-queue, note the residue class, follow up. |
| Rebottle | Tag for the bench, log the cage inspection separately. |
| Fabricate | Decide which build, check the drawing, walk it over, discuss it. |
| Cage-only | Strip the bottle, route two streams, re-tag both. |
Scrap is one mark. Fabrication is a conversation. At four o'clock on a Friday with eleven units left on the pad, those are not equivalent options, and no amount of caring about the environment makes them equivalent.
That is not a criticism of the graders. I am one of them and I did it too.
The rule we wrote
In early 2022 we made it a written procedure: nothing enters the regrind bunker until a second grader, who did not make the first call, answers no to four questions.
- Can the bottle hold liquid at atmospheric pressure, even if it would not hold it under load?
- Can the cage be sold as cage-only, or cut down into a frame?
- Can the pallet base be recovered for a swap onto another unit?
- Is there a build in the fabrication catalogue this unit suits?
A yes to any one of them and the unit goes back out of the scrap queue. All four have to be no.
Why it worked
Three reasons, and the first is the one that matters.
The second grader is not tired of that unit. They have no sunk four minutes in it and no desire for it to be over. They are reviewing a tag, not finishing a shift.
Scrap stopped being the default and became a decision. Before, scrap happened when nobody did anything else. After, scrap required a signature from a second person. Reversing which option is the path of least resistance is most of the whole intervention.
The questions are concrete. "Could this be reused?" invites a judgement. "Can the cage be cut into a planter frame?" has an answer.
What it recovered
About 11% of the scrap-routed stream came straight back out, which is roughly two percentage points of total intake. The reuse rate moved from 88% to 90% within a year and has crept to 93% since.
The recovered units split roughly: half to fabrication builds, a third to cage-only sales, and the balance to base-plate recovery and a second wash attempt.
Cost of the intervention: one line on a form, and perhaps two minutes a unit of a second grader's time on the marginal eighth of intake.
The thing I would tell anyone running a yard
We spent about $340,000 over five years on equipment to raise our reuse rate, and the single most effective change in that whole programme cost nothing and was a piece of paper.
If your diversion rate has plateaued with the right machines already installed, the problem is almost certainly not capability. It is which option happens when a tired person does the easy thing. Find that default and reverse it.
713 words · published 6 August 2024 by Dale Prichard, Senior grader at IBC Tote Market LLC. We correct posts rather than quietly deleting them; if something here is wrong, tell us and we will say what changed.