Seventeen Years In, the Number We Watch Weekly
Reading this because you are specifying, buying or selling containers? Send the details and a grader answers in writing, usually the same business day.
Diversion rate measures what you kept out of the ground. The reuse-to-recycle split inside it measures how much of the object's embodied work you preserved. The second number is the one that moves when the plant is run well, and it is the one we review every week.
We have been doing this since 2009. Intake has gone from about 1,100 containers in the first year to 66,300 in 2025, which is a nice number to put in a sentence and is not the number we manage.
The number on the board is the reuse-to-recycle split: of everything we divert from landfill, what share went back out as an object rather than as a material.
Why not diversion rate
Because diversion rate saturates. Ours has been effectively 100% since 2014, and a metric that cannot move is a metric that cannot guide a decision.
It is also easy to game without lying. A company that shreds everything it receives has a 100% diversion rate and has destroyed every object that passed through it. Diversion tells you what you kept out of the ground. It says nothing about whether you kept the thing or only its atoms.
What the split actually measures
Roughly 70% of an IBC's cradle-to-gate carbon sits in the steel rather than the plastic, and almost all of the total is spent getting the materials into the shape of a container: smelting, galvanising, tube-forming, blow-moulding, welding, assembly, testing.
Reuse keeps all of that. Recycling keeps the feedstock and spends energy destroying and rebuilding the shape. Reconditioning a 275 gallon tote avoids roughly 71 lb of CO₂e against new manufacture; shredding and remoulding the same tote avoids about 23.
So the split is a direct proxy for how much embodied work survived contact with our plant. 93 to 7 is the current figure, and we treat pushing the 7 downward as the job.
Why weekly
Because it responds to decisions made on the floor, by individual people, within days.
The split moves when a grader routes a marginal unit to fabrication rather than scrap. It moves when the second-look review catches a savable cage. It moves when the wash line declines a residue it should have attempted, or attempts one it should have declined. All of those are weekly-timescale decisions, and a metric reviewed annually gives nobody any feedback on them.
An annual sustainability figure is a report. A weekly figure on a whiteboard is a control.
What moved it, in order of effect
| Intervention | Year | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Closed-loop caustic wash line | 2016 | 71% → 78% |
| Rebottling bench | 2018 | 78% → 81% |
| Fabrication shop | 2019 – 2021 | 81% → 88% |
| Second-look review (a written rule) | 2022 | 88% → 90% |
| Steel pallet base separation | 2024 | 90% → 92% |
| Cage-only as a published product line | ongoing | 92% → 93% |
The row that matters most is the fourth. The fabrication shop had been open three years and the rate had stalled at 88%. What was missing was not capability — every machine was already in the building — but a mechanism to stop a tired grader taking the easy decision at four o'clock on a Friday.
A written four-question review by a second grader cost us one line on a form and recovered about 11% of the scrap-routed stream. We spent roughly $340,000 of capital over five years raising this number, and the single most effective change in the whole programme was a piece of paper.
Four numbers we deliberately do not chase
- Recycling rate. Higher is worse. A rising recycling rate means we are destroying more objects.
- Intake volume. It grew sixfold without the reuse share improving at all between 2009 and 2014. Throughput is not progress.
- Revenue per container. Pushes toward selling higher grades, which pushes toward overspecifying, which is the thing we most want not to do.
- Carbon neutrality. We run forklifts, a boiler and trucks. We avoid considerably more than we emit, and that is a different and more honest sentence than the one we could buy with offsets.
The ceiling
93% is not going to 100%, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of claim this whole page is arguing against.
There is an irreducible fraction. Bottles contaminated with cured resin or polyurethane cannot be washed, cannot be rebottled into food service, and have a limited life even as planters. Cages corroded through the tube wall are steel and nothing else. And the valves and gaskets — under half a pound a unit, mixed polypropylene, EPDM and sometimes a metal insert — have no outlet at all at our volume. We stockpile about four tons of them rather than bury them, which is a deferral and not a solution.
Realistically 95% is reachable and 96% would need somebody else to solve the valve problem.
What seventeen years taught us about metrics
Every environmental improvement this company has made started as somebody noticing that a disposal or downgrade line item was larger than the value of the same material handled properly. Not one of them started as an environmental initiative.
That is not cynicism and we have stopped being sheepish about it. A reuse operation where the ecology and the arithmetic point in different directions is fragile — it survives until the first bad quarter. One where they point the same way compounds, because every person on the floor has a reason to make the right call that does not depend on anybody caring.
Find the number where those two things coincide, put it on a board where the people making the decisions walk past it, and review it often enough that a bad week is visible. That is the whole management system here.
929 words · published 18 August 2026 by Marguerite Okonkwo, Operations 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.