Eleven Percent: The Second-Look Review, Two Years In
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The review pulls back about 11% of scrap-routed units. Roughly half become fabrication builds, a third are sold cage-only, and the rest yield a pallet base or pass a second wash. The single largest absorber is the cage planter — unglamorous, and it works.
I run the shop that absorbs whatever the second-look review pulls out of the scrap queue, so I see the downstream of that rule more clearly than anyone. Two years in, here is what it actually produces.
The headline
About 11% of units routed to scrap come back out. That is consistent across both years and across seasons, which surprised me — I had assumed the rate would fall as graders internalised the questions and stopped sending savable units to the queue in the first place.
It has not fallen, and I think the reason is that the marginal cases are genuinely marginal. There is an irreducible band of units where two competent graders disagree, and the review exists to catch exactly that band.
Where the recovered units go
| Destination | Share | Typical unit |
|---|---|---|
| Fabrication build | ≈49% | Crazed bottle, sound cage |
| Cage-only sale | ≈32% | Dead bottle, square cage |
| Pallet base recovery | ≈11% | Dead bottle, racked cage, good base |
| Second wash attempt | ≈8% | Residue the first cycle did not clear |
What absorbs the most bottles
Planters. Specifically the cage planter set: four cage frames cut to 24 inches, lined with geotextile, fitted with a reclaimed pallet base.
It is not an interesting product. It is a box. It is also the single largest absorber of marginal units in the building, because its requirements are so low: the cage needs to be roughly square and the base needs to be sound, and nothing else matters. A bottle that cannot hold water at all is irrelevant because the planter does not use the bottle.
The second largest is the compost tea brewer. That one does need a bottle, but only one that holds liquid at atmospheric pressure in an open-top vessel — which a crazed bottle will do indefinitely, because crazing propagates under hoop stress and there is no hoop stress in a top-cut tank at zero head.
That insight is worth stating plainly, because it is the physical fact the whole shop runs on: crazing is a stress failure, and most second-life uses have no stress. A bottle that will not hold 2,400 lb of water under a 40-inch head will quite happily hold sixty cubic feet of compost for a decade.
Builds ranked by how marginal a unit they will take
- Cage planter — needs a roughly square cage and a base. No bottle required at all.
- Firewood crib and trellis frames — cage only, geometry can be poor.
- Compost tea brewer — top-cut bottle, atmospheric only, crazing acceptable.
- Wash station — needs a bottle that holds a low head, so light crazing only.
- Rain catchment bank — needs a sound bottle at a 40-inch head. Crazing excluded.
- Aquaponics stack — needs documented food grade. Never a recovered marginal unit.
The last line matters. The review pulls units out of scrap; it does not relax grade requirements. An aquaponics build gets a documented food-grade bottle with a wash certificate, and no amount of wanting to save a unit changes that.
What we got wrong in year one
We over-built. The first six months of the review produced more recovered units than the catalogue could absorb, and we ended up with a row of top-cut bottles waiting for an order that had not arrived. That is not reuse; it is storage with extra steps, and it tied up yard space we needed.
Now we only cut to order, and recovered units wait in a holding row as whole units. A whole crazed bottle in a sound cage is still cage-only stock, still planter stock, still brewer stock. A top-cut bottle is only brewer stock. Keeping optionality costs nothing and we had been throwing it away in the name of getting ahead.
The other thing we got wrong
We tried to make the recovered units into products with good margins. Some of them are — the three-tote catchment bank and the wash station both earn properly. But the planter set at $420 for four is a thin product, and for a while we discussed dropping it.
That would have been a mistake. The planter absorbs the units nothing else can take. Its job is not margin; its job is being the floor of the process, so that the floor is a product rather than a shredder. Judged on what it displaces, it is the most valuable thing in the catalogue.
755 words · published 17 September 2024 by Carla Nystrom, Fabrication lead 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.