§ 06.2Knowledge / Blog
Sixteen years of grading, washing, hauling and reprocessing IBC totes produces opinions. These are the ones worth writing down — written by the people who do the work, with the numbers shown.
LatestSustainability
A decade after committing to send no tote component to landfill, an honest accounting of what the commitment required, what it returned, and the one stream it does not cover.
9 December 2025Tom Albright, Founder9 min read
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§ 06.2.1Browse by topic
The environmental case for reuse, with the arithmetic shown and the awkward numbers included.
How to specify, compare and buy IBC totes without overpaying for certainty you don't need.
What actually happens on a wash line, a grading bay and a cleanout visit.
Threads, markings, materials and the technical detail nobody else publishes.
Trailers, lanes, backhauls, pools and the freight economics of an awkward pallet.
Draining, dispensing, storing and repairing totes in a working plant.
UN/DOT marking, food-contact documentation and residue handling, described honestly.
How totes are used in chemistry, food, agriculture, brewing and water treatment.
Second lives for bottles that can no longer be trusted with a chemical.
§ 06.2.2Full archive
All 35 articles, newest first, grouped by year.
A decade after committing to send no tote component to landfill, an honest accounting of what the commitment required, what it returned, and the one stream it does not cover.
A specification checklist for anyone commissioning a line that will fill or receive IBC totes — twelve decisions, in the order they should be made.
Sixteen years of individually graded units produce some patterns worth publishing — including three that contradicted what we believed when we started.
Craft producers receive cleaning chemistry, glycol and sometimes ingredients in IBC totes, then face a container problem at a scale too small for anyone to care about. Except it isn't.
Agricultural IBC use is seasonal, outdoor and rinsate-heavy. Three characteristics that change how containers should be specified, stored and returned.
More totes are retired for a failed valve or a perished gasket than for anything wrong with the bottle. A five-minute inspection sequence that keeps containers in service.
Our worst figure is a 71% timber pallet reuse rate. Publishing it is the only reason anyone has grounds to believe the 98.4% on cages.
A spreadsheet is a perfectly good container asset register up to a specific, identifiable point. Here is what that point looks like and what to do when you reach it.
Austenitic stainless is so robust that nobody expects it to crack. In hot chloride service it does, and the failure is sudden rather than progressive.
An empty trailer going home is a near-free movement for whoever is standing on its route. How backhaul pricing works and how to get onto a lane.
How to turn a container diversion programme into a defensible number for your own reporting — and the four shortcuts that will get it challenged.
There is no industry-standard IBC grading scale, which means a grade letter is worth exactly as much as the criteria published behind it. Here is how to compare quotes properly.
The galvanised steel cage carries more embodied carbon than the bottle and lasts three times as long. Scrapping it alongside a failed bottle is this industry's biggest avoidable loss.
The single most valuable document in the used-container trade, and the five fields that make it useful rather than decorative.
IBC totes use a thread standard almost nobody outside the industry has met. A translation guide from a tote outlet to whatever your plant actually uses.
Why yards of mixed totes sit untouched for a decade, what happens on a clearing visit, and why three quarters of these jobs settle as a credit rather than a cost.
Trailer counts by capacity, the double-stacking rule most people get wrong, and why per-unit freight swings harder than per-unit price.
The waste hierarchy is thirty years old and still routinely misread. Reuse recovers manufacturing as well as material, and manufacturing is where almost all the carbon lives.
A bottle that failed a pressure test is still watertight at atmospheric pressure. Eleven formats we fabricate, with the fittings each one needs and the hard limits on all of them.
HDPE handles cold well. Water does not. A practical guide to overwintering totes without splitting bottles or retiring containers.
Pool sizing arithmetic, the commercial mechanism that decides success, and the honest threshold below which a pool is worse than buying one-way.
The cheapest part on an IBC tote causes most of its leaks. A practical selection guide across six compounds, plus the four failure modes worth recognising.
How a tote wash line recovers 92% of its water, what the remaining 8% is, and why the last few percent is harder and less useful than it sounds.
The only genuinely skilled judgement in a reclaim operation, described step by step — including why the order of the checks matters as much as the checks themselves.
Our worst published number is a 71% reuse rate on timber pallet bases. This is why it is bad, why we publish it anyway, and what we have tried.
A stainless IBC costs several times what a composite does and can be the cheaper and greener container — but only under one condition, and most operations do not meet it.
Empty IBC totes are usually treated as a disposal cost. Five specific mechanisms turn them into an avoidable loss, and all five are fixable with a phone call.
The mechanism behind most reconditioned-container complaints, explained properly — what permeates, how fast, why washing cannot reverse it, and how to buy around it.
Compliant resin is the easy part and the part everyone cites. The segregation, the fill history and the documentation are the hard parts, and all four are required.
A sealed IBC cannot drain. It is the most common operational complaint we hear and the simplest to fix — plus four other discharge problems with equally unglamorous causes.
The densest label in industrial packaging, decoded element by element — and a clear statement of the four things it does not tell you.
Every number behind our impact claims, worked through long-hand — including the ones that make reuse look less heroic than the marketing version.
The right amount of preparation before a reclaim pickup is less than most people do, and in a different order. A practical guide to heels, caps and the things that actually matter.
Where a reconditioned IBC tote is genuinely the better buy, where it genuinely is not, and the three specifications that should decide it rather than habit.
Five factors set the price of a used IBC tote, and only one of them is the thing most sellers focus on. A walk through how a reclaim buyer actually values a yard full of empties.
Reading isn't the point
Whether to buy new or reconditioned, whether to pool or ship one-way, what grade you actually need. Tell us the situation and we'll answer it directly.
