One flatbed,
sixteen
totes.
Questions about the company rather than the containers? Put them in the message field — they reach the same desk.
IBC Tote Market LLC started in 2009 with a borrowed flatbed, sixteen used totes and a conviction that the industry was shredding things it should be washing. Seventeen years later the same conviction runs a reclaim plant on Page Industrial Boulevard that puts 93% of its intake back into service and has sent nothing to landfill since 2014.
The founding observation
In 2009 our founder was a freight dispatcher watching the same thing happen on three different lanes: trucks delivering full IBCs into a plant, and a different truck leaving a week later with the empties going to a compactor. The containers were undamaged. They had held corn syrup. Somebody three hundred miles away was buying new ones that month.
The gap was not technical. Nothing about washing an IBC is difficult. The gap was that nobody owned the problem: the shipper did not want the empties back, the receiver had no route for them, and the brokers who sold containers had no interest in reverse flow. The entire business is an answer to that organisational gap rather than an engineering one.
Three decisions that shaped the company
2014 — stop landfilling anything
Up to then we scrapped what did not wash. Then we costed it properly and found that a disposal invoice was larger than the scrap value of the same material, which meant the landfill decision was losing money as well as being indefensible. That was the last year any load left here for a cell.
2016 — put everything in writing
After a dispute over a grade that neither side could prove, we shut off the phone line. Every quote, grade, prior-contents record and freight term has gone in writing since. It cost us customers who wanted to talk and it eliminated nearly every argument we used to have.
2019 — open a fabrication shop
The hardest number to move was the 15–20% of intake that could not be washed or rebottled. Fabrication was the answer: a bottle that cannot hold 2,400 lb of water can hold sixty cubic feet of compost for a decade. The reuse rate went from 81% to 93% over five years, almost entirely because of that shop.
What has not changed
We still grade by hand, 27 points, about four minutes a unit. We still publish the grade standard so you can hold us to it. We still refuse to sell a non-food-history bottle into potable service at any price. And we still tell customers when a cheaper grade will do the job, which costs us margin on roughly a third of enquiries and is the single biggest reason people come back.
The company, in numbers
- Founded
- 2009, St. Louis, Missouri
- First year intake
- About 1,100 containers
- 2025 intake
- 66,300 containers
- Cumulative diverted
- 418,000 containers
- Reuse rate
- 93%
- Landfill, since 2014
- Zero
- Headcount
- 34, of whom 23 on the yard or the line
- Phone numbers
- None, deliberately
Where we are
10275 Page Industrial Blvd
St. Louis, MO 63132
One site. The grading pad, the wash line, the rebottling bench, the fabrication shop and the regrind bunker are inside one fence, which is why a container is assessed once rather than four times.
Walk the plantWhere it got to
About the company
Why St. Louis?
Geography. St. Louis sits inside a day's drive of the Midwest chemical corridor, the Illinois and Iowa agricultural belt, the Ohio Valley food processors and the Arkansas and Tennessee distribution hubs. Reverse logistics is a radius business — the economics live or die on how far an empty container has to travel — and this radius covers more IBC generators than any other spot we could have picked.
Why is there no phone number?
A decision made in 2016 after an argument about a grade that neither side could prove. Grades, prior contents, UN ratings and freight terms go wrong when they are spoken and remembered. Putting everything in writing cost us some impatient customers and eliminated almost every dispute we used to have. We have never gone back.
Are you a broker or do you actually handle the containers?
We handle them. Every container is physically graded on our pad, and the wash line, rebottling bench, fabrication shop and regrind bunker are inside one fence on Page Industrial Boulevard. We broker freight, because owning trucks is a different business, but we do not broker containers.
Come and look at it
Will-call inspection during yard hours, or Saturday morning by appointment. Closed-toe boots, please.