Recycling
& regrind.
If you have containers that are genuinely finished, we will take them — and tell you honestly if some of them are not finished at all.
We recycle IBCs that cannot be reused — and only those. About 7% of what we take in. Bottles are shredded, washed and pelletised into post-industrial HDPE regrind; cages are baled as galvanised steel; pallets are recovered as steel or ground for mulch and boiler fuel. One 275 gallon unit yields roughly 118 lb of recovered material and nothing for the landfill. We have not sent a load to landfill since 2014.
The order of operations matters more than the rate
A company that recycles 100% of its intake sounds better than one that recycles 7%. It is usually much worse. Recycling rate measures how much you destroyed; diversion rate measures how much you kept out of the ground. The number that actually matters is the split between reuse and recycle inside the diverted fraction.
Ours runs about 93% reuse to 7% recycle. We treat pushing the recycle fraction down as the goal, which is why the fabrication shop exists: a bottle that will not hold liquid under pressure will still happily be a planter, and a planter is reuse.
What happens to a dead tote
- Final assessment. A second grader confirms the unit genuinely cannot be washed, rebottled or fabricated. Roughly one in nine gets pulled back out at this step and sent to fabrication instead.
- Disassembly. Bottle out, valve and gasket off, cage and pallet separated. Each stream is clean from here on, which is what makes the regrind valuable.
- Shred. Bottles granulated to a 12 mm flake.
- Wash and dry. Hot caustic flake wash, rinse, centrifuge, hot-air dry. This is where residual product actually leaves the polymer.
- Pelletise. Extruded and pelletised to a consistent melt index, then lot-tested and documented.
- Steel. Cages baled, pallets separated by material, both sold into the galvanised scrap market.
- Wood. Pallet timber ground for landscape mulch and boiler fuel.
Scrap pickups
If you have a yard full of destroyed totes, we will quote a pickup. Below about thirty units it is usually net-zero — we take them, you pay nothing, nobody gets paid. Above that it starts to be worth money to you, because baled galvanised steel and clean post-industrial HDPE both have real markets.
Compare that with a disposal hauler at $18–$40 a unit, and the arithmetic is not subtle. Read the buyback terms — even a scrap-grade lot has a price.
Material yield, 275 gal
| Stream | Yield |
|---|---|
| HDPE bottle | ≈38 lb → regrind pellet |
| Galvanised cage | ≈48 lb → steel scrap |
| Steel pallet | ≈32 lb → steel scrap |
| Wood pallet (alt.) | ≈24 lb → mulch / fuel |
| Valve & gasket | ≈0.4 lb → unplaced |
| Total recovered | ≈118 lb |
| To landfill | 0 lb |
Regrind specification
- Resin
- Post-industrial HDPE, blow-moulding grade
- Form
- Pellet; flake available
- Colour
- Natural translucent / mixed
- Melt index
- Lot-tested, documented
- Not for
- Food-contact applications
What 7% looks like
Audited against yard scale tickets and reconciled quarterly.
Recycling questions
Why do you call recycling a last resort?
Because it destroys the most valuable thing about an IBC: its shape. Reconditioning one tote avoids roughly 71 lb of CO₂e against a new unit. Shredding the same tote and remoulding the resin avoids about 23 lb, because you spend energy on grinding, washing, drying, pelletising and moulding — and because regrind displaces virgin resin at less than one-to-one. Recycling is enormously better than landfill and considerably worse than reuse. Both facts are true.
What does an IBC actually yield?
About 38 lb of HDPE from the bottle, 48 lb of galvanised steel from the cage, and either 32 lb of steel or 24 lb of wood from the pallet. On a 275 gallon unit that is roughly 118 lb of recovered material and effectively nothing left over — the gaskets and the valve are the only fraction we cannot place, and they are under half a pound.
Where does the regrind go?
Post-industrial HDPE regrind from IBC bottles is high-quality feedstock: consistent resin, known history, no consumer contamination. Ours goes into corrugated drainage pipe, plastic pallets, agricultural sheet, non-food containers and injection-moulded industrial parts. It does not go into food-contact packaging, because post-industrial regrind with mixed prior contents should not.
Can you take totes that still have residue?
A trace heel, yes. A measurable volume of product, no — that makes it a waste shipment rather than a container shipment, and it needs a permitted facility and a manifest we do not hold. Drain them, close the valve, and tell us what was in them. If you have a genuine waste-disposal problem we will point you to a licensed TSDF rather than quietly taking it.
Every stream, with yield and destination
| Component | Yield | Process | Destination |
|---|---|---|---|
| HDPE bottle | ≈38 lb | Granulate to 12 mm flake, hot caustic flake wash, centrifuge, hot-air dry, extrude, pelletise | Corrugated drainage pipe, plastic pallets, agricultural sheet, non-food containers |
| Galvanised cage | ≈48 lb | Stripped, baled separately from pallet steel | Galvanised steel scrap market |
| Steel pallet base | ≈32 lb | Separated at disassembly, baled as clean single-type steel | Steel scrap market |
| Composite pallet base | ≈24 lb | Split: steel frame to scrap, plastic deck to regrind | Two streams |
| Timber pallet base | ≈24 lb | Ground | Landscape mulch and boiler fuel |
| Strapping and film | <1 lb | Baled | Mixed plastics reprocessor |
| Valve and gasket | ≈0.4 lb | No viable separation at our volume | Stockpiled — the one unresolved stream |
| Total recovered | ≈118 lb | ||
| To landfill | 0 lb | Nothing since 2014 |
Regrind specification
- Resin
- Post-industrial HDPE, blow-moulding grade
- Form
- Pellet; flake available
- Colour
- Natural translucent to mixed
- Melt index
- Lot-tested and documented
- Contamination
- No consumer stream, no mixed-polymer fraction
- Not supplied for
- Food-contact applications
- Why not
- Post-industrial regrind with mixed prior contents should not go into food packaging, and we will not claim otherwise
Four questions before anything enters the bunker
A written rule since 2022. It pulls about 11% of the scrap-routed stream back out, and it cost us one line on a form.
- 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 those and the unit comes back out of the scrap queue. All four have to be no, and the review is done by a second grader who did not make the first call.
Why a second person matters
Scrap is one mark on a tag. 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. The second grader has no sunk time in the unit and no desire for it to be over — they are reviewing a tag, not finishing a shift.
We spent roughly $340,000 of capital over five years raising our reuse rate, and the single most effective change in that whole programme was a piece of paper that reversed which option happens when a tired person does the easy thing.
| 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 |
Why recycling is three times worse than reuse
| Route | CO₂e | Avoided vs. new | What is preserved |
|---|---|---|---|
| New manufacture | ≈164 lb | — | Nothing — this is the baseline |
| Recycled and remoulded | ≈141 lb | ≈23 lb | The material only; the form is destroyed |
| Rebottled | ≈110 lb | ≈54 lb | The cage and pallet — about 70% of embodied carbon |
| Reconditioned | ≈93 lb | ≈71 lb | The entire object |
Recycling spends granulation, flake washing, drying, pelletising and re-moulding energy — roughly 31 lb combined — and regrind then displaces virgin resin at about 0.9 to 1 on a mass basis with a quality downgrade. Reconditioning spends wash energy, caustic production and a pro-rata share of the original manufacture across the cage's remaining service lives.
So a company that recycles 100% of its intake has destroyed every object that passed through it, and one that recycles 7% has not. Diversion rate tells you what you kept out of the ground; the reuse-to-recycle split inside it tells you how much of the object's embodied work survived.
What a pickup is worth, and when it is not
| Quantity | Terms | Net to you |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 units, off-corridor | Usually declined — freight exceeds value | — |
| Under 30 units, on a corridor | Net-zero collection: we take them, nobody pays | $0, against $540 – $1,200 of disposal avoided |
| 30 – 100 units | We pay the scrap schedule | $180 – $1,200 |
| 100+ units | We pay, freight covered on corridor | $600 – $4,000+ |
| Mixed scrap and sellable | Graded split — frequently better than expected | Quoted |
Set that against a disposal hauler at $18 to $40 a unit, and the arithmetic is not subtle. Even a net-zero pickup on twenty-five dead totes saves you $450 to $1,000 and gives you a diversion record instead of a weight ticket that says nothing about where the material went.
Detailed questions
Is your regrind certified to any standard?
Lot-tested for melt index and documented, which is what a pipe or pallet moulder needs. It is not certified for food contact and we will not claim it is, because post-industrial regrind from mixed prior contents should not go into food packaging regardless of what a test says.
Can I buy regrind from you?
Yes, in pellet or flake, by the gaylord or the truckload. Polymer processors occasionally buy back material that came from their own region's totes, which closes a loop rather neatly. Pricing tracks the virgin resin market at a discount.
What happens to the wash water and separated oil?
The caustic charge recirculates through a three-stage separator and a carbon polish and washes dozens of units before it is spent. Spent charge is neutralised and discharged under permit. Separated solids go to energy recovery and the oil fraction to a used-oil reclaimer. Make-up water is under 9 gallons per tote against an industry single-pass typical of 40 or more.
Why do you stockpile valves instead of disposing of them?
Because the pledge is a decision rule rather than a number: when a stream has no outlet, we stop or we store. We do not bury. There is about four tons of valve and gasket assemblies in bay three growing by roughly a ton a year net of the 15% we can resell as reclaimed parts. It is a deferral, not a solution, and we would rather say so.
What would fix the valve problem?
Regional aggregation — four or five Midwest reclaim yards pooling their valve streams would justify a sorting line, and we have had two conversations about it with no agreement yet. Failing that, a valve designed for disassembly, with a captured rather than bonded seal and a single polymer family. That is a conversation with manufacturers rather than with us.
Do you issue a certificate of destruction?
Yes, on request, for customers who need to document that branded or regulated containers were genuinely destroyed rather than resold. It records the serial numbers, the date, the disassembly and the material destinations. This is a common request from pharmaceutical and consumer-brand customers.
How do I know nothing goes to landfill?
Because landfill costs money and leaves a paper trail. If we sent material to a landfill there would be a disposal invoice, a weight ticket and a hauler contract, and our accounts payable contain none. Ask and we will show you the vendor ledger — it is a materially easier thing for an auditor to confirm than any positive claim.
Can you handle non-IBC plastics?
Drums and poly pallets, yes, on the same streams. General mixed plastics, no — we are set up for known-provenance HDPE from bulk containers, and our regrind quality depends entirely on not contaminating that. A mixed-plastics load would be worth less to us than it is to a reprocessor who is set up for it.
Before you scrap them, let us look
About one in nine units sent to us as scrap turns out to be a planter, a brewer or a cage somebody wants. We would rather find that out than shred it.