The Backhaul Map: How Routing Makes Buyback Freight Free
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Our outbound trucks deliver reconditioned units and would otherwise return empty. A collection on the return leg costs loading time and little else, which is why buyback pickups of 20+ units within about 400 miles normally ship free.
Customers sometimes read our free-freight-on-buyback terms as a loss leader. It is not. It is the single least generous thing we do, and understanding why tells you how to get the most out of it.
The asymmetry
We ship reconditioned containers outbound — to farms, food plants, chemical blenders, breweries, job sites. Those trucks arrive, unload, and then have to get back to St. Louis.
A trailer returning empty is pure cost. The tractor, the driver's hours, the fuel and the depreciation are all being spent to move air. Every freight operation in the world is organised around not doing that.
So when somebody two hours from a delivery point has forty empty totes they want gone, the marginal cost to us of collecting them is: the deviation mileage, the loading time, and nothing else. The truck was making that trip regardless.
What makes a collection fit
Four things, and they are all about geometry rather than commerce.
- Proximity to a route we already run. Not distance from St. Louis — distance from a line we are already driving. A pickup 300 miles out on a corridor we run weekly is easier than one 90 miles out in a direction we never go.
- Enough units to justify the stop. Below about twenty, the loading time and deviation start to exceed what the containers are worth. Twenty is the number where it reliably works.
- Loadability. A forklift and a dock, or at minimum a forklift and hard standing. A driver hand-loading forty totes is two hours we did not plan for, and that is the thing most likely to kill a collection.
- Timing flexibility. If you can take the truck on the day it is in the area rather than a day you have chosen, almost everything else becomes negotiable.
The corridors
St. Louis is a good place to run this business from, and it is not an accident. Within roughly a day's drive there are more IBC generators than from almost anywhere else in the country: the Illinois and Iowa agricultural belt, the Ohio Valley food processors, the Gulf-adjacent chemical corridor, the Arkansas and Tennessee distribution hubs.
Our regular outbound lanes run broadly north into Illinois and Iowa, east into Indiana and Ohio, south into Arkansas and Tennessee, and west into Kansas and Nebraska. A collection on or near any of those is straightforward. A collection in, say, the Dakotas is not — not because it is far, but because we are not going there anyway.
| Situation | Typical freight outcome |
|---|---|
| 20+ units, on a weekly corridor, under 400 mi | We cover it |
| 20+ units, 400 – 900 mi, on a corridor | Usually shared, often 50/50 |
| 20+ units, off-corridor | Quoted; sometimes still free if a route can be adjusted |
| Under 20 units, on a corridor | Quoted; frequently nets to zero against the container value |
| Under 20 units, off-corridor | Usually costs more to move than the units are worth |
| Will-call at our yard, any quantity | Paid at the gate, no freight at all |
How to make yourself easy to collect
This is the practical half of the article, and it is worth real money to anybody generating empties continuously.
- Stack four high with the cages interlocked. A driver can load a prepared stack in thirty minutes and an unprepared sprawl in two hours.
- Drain fully and cap the valves. A unit with a sloshing heel cannot go on the truck at all, and finding that out at the dock wastes everybody's morning.
- Face the data plates to the aisle. It speeds our intake grading, and better grading is better money for you.
- Keep food-history and chemical-history units in separate stacks. Mixed stacks get graded down, and that is a direct cost to you.
- Flag anything damaged separately rather than hiding it in the middle. We buy damaged units too; we just price them differently and we would rather know.
- Be flexible on the day. "Any Tuesday in the next three weeks" gets a free collection far more often than "the 14th".
Why twenty units
Because the stop itself has a cost that does not scale with quantity. Deviating a truck, getting in the gate, finding the right person, positioning, loading, paperwork — call it an hour and a half even when everything goes well.
At twenty units that overhead is spread across enough container value to work. At six units it is not, and the honest answer is that we would be paying to collect them. Which we will occasionally do, for a programme customer or to keep a relationship, and it is not a sustainable default.
The standing-programme version
If you generate empties continuously, the right structure is a scheduled collection on a count threshold rather than ad hoc requests. We know roughly when you will hit twenty units, we build you into a route in advance, and the freight is reliably free rather than dependent on luck.
It also removes the thing that actually bothers most plants about empties, which is not the money. It is the wall of containers accumulating by the dock door and nobody owning the decision to do something about it.
887 words · published 16 September 2025 by Tomás Vrba, Dispatch and freight 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.