I have been driving a buy-back route for IBC Denver for almost three years. My weekly run covers a loop from the Front Range through the Western Slope and back, hitting roughly twelve to twenty pickups depending on the season. Most of those pickups are at warehouses, manufacturing plants, food and beverage co-packers, and the occasional ranch.
I want to share some things I have learned that nobody warned me about when I took the job.
Most empty IBCs hide in places you would not expect.
When a customer says "we have about fifteen empties," what they often mean is that fifteen are lined up neatly behind the loading dock. There are usually another five to ten scattered around the property: by the back fence, behind a row of pallets, in a side yard nobody walks through, sometimes in an actual ditch. I have learned to ask for a five-minute walking tour of the property before I count totes. I have never finished one of those tours with the same number I started with.
Almost everyone wants to give me a tour.
I do not know if it is the truck or the company name on the side or just that I look like the kind of person you can chat with for a few minutes, but the receiving managers at almost every place I visit will offer to walk me through their operation. I have been on tours of three pickle plants, two breweries, a glycerin distillery, a bottled-water facility, a ranch supply, a paint manufacturer, a hot sauce co-packer, an ink factory, and a place that makes vegetable rennet for cheesemaking. I now know more about the bulk-liquid supply chain than I expected to learn in this lifetime.
The cleanest empties come from food plants.
This makes sense if you think about it. Food plants have to keep their floors and equipment clean for inspection, and that habit extends to how they store the empty totes waiting for pickup. Their totes show up in our intake bay with the tracking labels still legible, the valves still capped, and the cages straight. Their totes also tend to have spent time holding things that are easy to wash out — sugar syrup, juice concentrate, vegetable oil — which means our reconditioning cycle is a single pass.
The dirtiest empties come from agriculture.
Agriculture is rough on a tote. Dust, sun, mud, residual fertilizer, the occasional snake. I have picked up totes from cattle ranches in the Western Slope that had three years of weather etched into the cage galvanizing. Those totes still have a second life in them; they just need more washing and they tend to grade out as B or C cosmetic. The customers know this and price expectation is calibrated.
People are surprised that we pay them to take the totes.
About half the customers I pick up from started the buy-back conversation thinking they would have to pay us for disposal. When the math turns the other way and they get a check for $24 a tote times fifteen totes, the receiving manager almost always says some version of "well, that just made my month." It is the part of the job that has not gotten old in three years.
The tote that surprised me
My favorite pickup so far was a small farmstead distillery west of Grand Junction that had four totes lined up in their barn. Three of them were standard. The fourth had been converted, by the distiller himself, into a homemade swamp cooler — he had cut the top off, mounted a fan inside, and run garden hose through it. He apologized for the modification and said we probably could not buy it back. I told him we absolutely would, but he should keep it because it was way cooler than anything we sell. He kept it. We bought the other three.
— Daniel Coyle, IBC Denver