Tote Buy-Back
Got empty IBCs piling up? We pay you to take them off your hands and route them through our reconditioning bays.
Services
Five things, obsessively well.
Buying back. Reconditioning. Trucking. Recycling. Modifying. We don’t do hot dogs and we don’t do mortgages — just IBCs and the things that keep them alive.
Tell us what you need
Same form on every page. Same human inbox. We answer every inquiry — promise.
Reconditioning
9-stage hot-wash, leak-test, sanitize and certify. The same process for every reborn tote we ship.
Lower-48 Transport
Fleet pickups for full and partial loads. We handle the BOL, the routing, and the friendly driver who shows up at 6 a.m.
End-of-Life Recycling
When a tote can’t be reborn anymore, we strip the cage, granulate the bottle, and ship the resin back into manufacturing.
Custom Modifications
Cut tops, weld nipples, add sight gauges, swap valves, fit heaters. We’ll modify a tote to do whatever weird thing you need.
How it fits together
Five services, one closed loop.
Each of our five services exists because the other four also exist. Pull any one of them out and the math stops working. Here is how the loop closes.
The buy-back program is the upstream side. Without it, we would have no supply of used totes to recondition, and the entire reborn tote business would not exist. We pay customers per tote (and offer a 15% bonus when they take it as credit) because the supply of empties is the rate-limiting input to everything else.
Reconditioning is the heart of the operation. Every tote that comes in through buy-back gets evaluated, washed, leak-tested, and certified. The output is the inventory we sell as reborn product. A tote that fails the inspection at any point gets routed to end-of-life recycling instead.
Transportation is the connective tissue. The same fleet that picks up empty totes from a buy-back partner often delivers reborn totes to a different customer on the way back. Routing efficiency on these "two-way" runs is one of the reasons our freight pricing is competitive — we are not paying for empty miles.
End-of-life recycling closes the loop. The 9% of incoming totes that we cannot responsibly recondition are stripped down to raw materials — HDPE pellet, scrap steel, hardwood mulch — and routed back into manufacturing partners. Zero pounds to landfill. We issue Certificates of Recycling quarterly to participating customers.
Custom modifications is the surprise fifth piece. It started as a side project because customers kept asking us to cut tops off totes for upcycle projects, and it has grown into a small but reliable revenue stream that helps fund the rest of the operation. The mods bay is also where we do specialty work for film productions, ranchers, beekeepers, and the occasional aquarium.
Pricing notes that apply across all services
- No setup fees — we do not charge an account setup fee, an "onboarding" fee, or any other inert charge.
- Net 30 for established customers — first orders are paid up front, but after the first invoice we will set up Net 30 terms automatically.
- Volume discounts kick in at 10+ — across products and services, the per-unit price drops a few percent at 10 units, more at 50, and again at 100.
- Freight is quoted separately — we never bundle freight into the per-unit price because it makes comparison shopping harder for customers. Your quote will always show product cost and freight cost broken out.
- No "rush" surcharges — if we cannot fit your order into our normal schedule, we will say so honestly rather than charge a premium for expedited service.
Service FAQ
The questions we get about how the operation works.
If you are about to engage one of our services for the first time, this is what other first-timers have asked.
Do I have to use multiple services or can I just buy one tote?
You can do either. About 30% of our customers only ever buy product (totes) from us. About 25% use product plus transportation. About 20% use product plus buy-back (a closed loop). About 15% use the custom mods bay. About 10% use end-of-life recycling. Mix and match — there is no "package" that has to include everything.
Can I use buy-back without buying new totes?
Yes — about a third of our buy-back partners are companies that have empty totes piling up but no need to buy more from us. We pay cash via ACH, no obligation to purchase. We just want the supply of clean buy-back totes to flow.
What is the minimum order for any service?
For buy-back, the minimum is 4 totes (smaller than that and the pickup math does not pencil out). For reconditioning, no minimum — we will recondition a single tote. For transportation, no minimum — we can ship one tote on a broker LTL line. For recycling, no minimum. For custom modifications, no minimum.
Can you handle a one-time large order?
Yes, with planning. Our largest single order to date was 240 reconditioned 275-gal totes for a fertilizer company in southeastern Colorado. We executed it across three weeks with three trailer drops. If you need 50+ totes at once, give us 7-10 days of lead time so we can dedicate a bay to your order.
Do you work with brokers and resellers?
Yes — we have a few resale relationships with regional packaging distributors who buy in bulk and sell into markets we do not directly serve. Resale pricing is roughly 12% off our published per-tote prices for orders over 50 units. Email us if you are interested.
A typical year
What our service mix actually looks like across a calendar year.
The breakdown of our service volume by category, as a rough percentage of total annual operations. Useful as a reality check on how the company actually runs.
| Category | % of revenue | % of staff hours | % of customer interactions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reconditioned IBC sales | 52% | 38% | 45% |
| Used IBC sales (no recond) | 14% | 8% | 18% |
| New IBC sales | 9% | 4% | 6% |
| Stainless tank sales | 5% | 6% | 3% |
| Buy-back operations | −4% (cost center) | 14% | 10% |
| Transportation as service | 10% | 11% | 8% |
| End-of-life recycling | 1% (break-even) | 7% | 2% |
| Custom modifications | 5% | 9% | 3% |
| Accessories and parts | 4% | 3% | 5% |
A few observations from this table. Buy-back is our only "cost center" — we lose money on a per-transaction basis on buy-back operations because we are paying customers and providing freight at our cost. The reason is that buy-back is the upstream supply for the entire reconditioning operation, and without it the rest of the business would not exist. Buy-back is funded by reconditioning sales, in effect. The math works out because the reconditioning margin pays for the buy-back acquisition cost roughly four times over.
End-of-life recycling is roughly break-even. We do not make money on the 9% of incoming totes that we strip down and route to recycling streams. We do it because not doing it would leave us with rejected totes piling up in the back yard, and because the customers who care about closed-loop reuse care about it specifically.
Custom modifications and accessories are surprisingly profitable for their share of staff hours. Both are essentially overhead-low service lines that fund the rest of the operation when the bay is at lower utilization.
What our customer base looks like by segment
- Regular repeat customers (8+ orders/year): About 18% of customer count, 45% of revenue. The most predictable part of our operation. Most have been with us for 4+ years.
- Quarterly customers (3-7 orders/year): About 32% of customer count, 35% of revenue. The middle of our distribution. Usually larger food and beverage co-packers, fertilizer distributors, and ag suppliers.
- Occasional customers (1-2 orders/year): About 38% of customer count, 16% of revenue. Project-based buyers, construction supply companies, smaller co-packers.
- One-time customers: About 12% of customer count, 4% of revenue. People who needed a tote once and got it from us. Many of them eventually become occasional customers a year or two later.
What we do not do, by service category
For each of our five service lines, here is the boundary of what we will and will not take on. These limits come from a mix of capacity constraints, technical limits, and cases where we know we are not the best fit and would rather refer you somewhere appropriate.
Buy-back
Will: pick up 4+ totes per location, pay per-tote at the published rates, free pickup on full pallets, ACH payment within 7 days, optional credit conversion at +15%.
Will not: accept hazmat-residue totes, pay rates for "unknown contents" totes higher than the unknown-industrial floor, schedule pickups outside the lower-48 service area.
Reconditioning
Will: hot-wash and certify any composite or stainless IBC that meets our intake standards, run toll reconditioning on customer-owned totes, provide audit-ready documentation, host customer audits in the bay.
Will not: skip stages on a deadline, certify food-grade without running food-spec sanitization, ship a tote without a Birth Certificate, recondition non-IBC bulk packaging (drums, kegs, fiber drums).
Transportation
Will: handle full-truckload and partial loads to 38 lower-48 states, route via own fleet or vetted broker network, provide daily tracking updates, arrange lift-gate delivery on request.
Will not: ship hazmat (we route those to licensed haz partners), cross borders, run reefer trailers, provide expedited or same-day service.
Recycling
Will: process end-of-life totes from our own buy-back stream, accept customer-supplied dead totes for $9/tote, issue Certificates of Recycling, route HDPE to granulation and steel to scrap mill.
Will not: accept hazmat-residue totes, accept non-IBC plastic containers, accept totes whose prior contents we cannot identify.
Custom modifications
Will: cut tops, weld fittings, install heaters, swap valves, fit sight gauges, apply branding wraps, build aquaponics rigs, fabricate one-off conversions.
Will not: modify for pressurized service above 5 psi, modify for hazmat storage, validate for medical-grade applications, compromise the cage's structural integrity.