35 entries since 2023
Notes from the intake gate, the wash line and the order desk. Grading data, failure post-mortems, freight arithmetic and the quarterly diversion figures — including the ones that went the wrong way.
Order desk
We answer questions from people who are not buying anything. If yours is common enough it usually becomes a post.
Not a marketing blog. These are working notes written by the people who grade, wash, weld and haul containers, published because the information is genuinely hard to find anywhere else and because publishing our own mistakes is the cheapest way to stay honest about the rest.
01Most recent
Six months of figures, a new bottle supplier, and a problem we finally made progress on.
Twenty-one thousand containers through the gate in six months, an 83.1 % reuse rate, and the first movement in three years on the landfill fraction.
02By topic
Diversion figures, carbon arithmetic and the claims we refuse to make.
How the container business actually works, told without the trade-show gloss.
Incidents, near misses and the cheap things that prevent expensive ones.
Materials, failure modes, geometry and the physics of a plastic box in a steel cage.
Prices, grades, negotiation and the arithmetic behind a container decision.
What actually happens at 3505 Montopolis Drive, including the parts that go wrong.
Heat, freeze, drought, hurricanes and what they all do to bulk containers.
20267 entries
Six months of figures, a new bottle supplier, and a problem we finally made progress on.
Regrind pricing in 2026, who buys it, and why the number matters to people who will never touch it.
We refuse to cherry-pick loads. Here is what that policy actually costs and earns.
The most common request we refuse, and the reasoning behind refusing it every time.
An odd little corner of the business that runs on entirely different rules.
What a five-year-old outdoor bottle looks like when you light it properly.
Twenty percent more product for seven inches of height, and one very important measurement.
202512 entries
Reuse rate up, empty miles finally down, and one figure we still cannot move.
You are not buying a cleaner container. You are buying a defensible answer to four questions.
Semiconductor and specialty chemistry produces containers we will not put into reuse at any price.
We went back through a year of images and counted what actually kills containers.
The deposit-container problem, and why the data plate is the first thing we read.
One measurement, taken in twenty seconds, predicts more failures than any other single check.
We use potable water and heat to clean containers, and there is no version where that is free.
Seventeen years of writing down what was in the container. It is the whole company, really.
The plumbing is easy. The grade selection and the siphon are where people come unstuck.
When it is cheaper to put a new bottle in your old cage than to buy anything at all.
A small operational confession, and the process change that followed.
A customer filled a standard poly container with a solvent blend. Nothing ignited. It very easily could have.
202411 entries
The year in figures, including the ones that went the wrong way.
From June to November we keep stock deliberately unsold, and it is not a marketing gesture.
The least profitable machine on the site, and the one that makes the rest of our claims possible.
Austin's drought restrictions are the most reliable demand signal in our business.
A field guide to every outlet standard we have met in seventeen years, and the adapters between them.
HDPE deforms under sustained load, and the rate roughly doubles for every 20 °F.
The largest discount we offer costs us almost nothing and almost nobody asks for it.
The most aggressive thing we handle is not a chemical. It is breakfast.
Everyone sizes a rack for a container. Almost nobody sizes it for what goes in the container.
What a genuinely large recovery looks like from the inside, including the parts that went badly.
One page, printable, for the wall next to the tank array.
20235 entries
A diversion percentage without a denominator is a marketing device.
Haze, chalk, stress-whitening and stain are four different things with four different meanings.
February 2021 rewrote everyone's assumptions about how cold it gets here.
A cheap container is not a discount. It is an unpriced transfer of risk.
Intake is the only station where saying no is the whole job.
◆On the yard
»Keep reading
Longer, structured, less anecdotal.
Behind every number in the diversion reports.
Forty-three of them, no scrolling required.
One form, one human, one written quote. Totes to buy, totes to sell, a wash job, a recycling pickup — it all starts here.