1,400 containers off a Pasadena blending site

The scope

A specialty chemical blender on the Pasadena side of the ship channel decommissioned a production line and found itself with roughly 1,400 intermediate bulk containers spread across three storage areas and a leased overflow lot. The site needed them gone in six weeks to release the lease. That is the entire brief, and it is a much harder brief than it sounds.

Note the last row. Forty-six containers went back to the customer, because their prior contents were either undocumented or on our exclusion list. That was in the contract from the first draft and it was still an uncomfortable conversation in week five.

How it was priced

We do not price a load this size per unit up front, because nobody can grade 1,400 containers from photographs and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. What we did instead was band it.

1. A sampled survey: 120 containers pulled at random across all four storage areas and graded properly on site over two days.
2. A banded price sheet agreed against that sample — a figure per grade, not a figure per container.
3. A collar: if the actual mix came in more than 15 % worse than the sample on a value-weighted basis, we would re-open the conversation rather than absorb it or push it back.
4. Grading in at our yard against photographs, with a shared spreadsheet updated daily so the customer could watch the mix land.

The final mix came in 6 % worse than the sample, inside the collar, and nobody had to have an awkward conversation about it. The collar cost us nothing and it was the single most useful clause in the agreement, because it let the customer sign without needing to trust our sampling.

The logistics

1,400 containers is 54 full trailer loads at 26 single-stacked, or 27 at 52 double-stacked. Empty containers double-stack, so the second number is the relevant one — but only if the receiving yard can take 52 units off a trailer in a reasonable window, which ours could not do 27 times in six weeks alongside normal intake.

Week three is the lesson. We took six loads because we could, and the wash line — 260 units a week at L1 to L2 — could not absorb 312 arrivals on top of routine intake. Containers stacked up in the yard, which costs space, handling and eventually goodwill. Week four we throttled deliberately. If we ran this again we would level at four to five loads a week and take seven weeks.

Three things we got wrong

1. We under-scoped the overflow lot

The leased overflow lot had been used as a dumping ground for two years and the containers there were in materially worse condition than those inside the fence — more UV exposure, more forklift damage, more standing water in the pallets. Our sample took 30 units from that lot out of 120, proportional to its share of the total. It should have been sampled separately, because it was effectively a different population.

2. We assumed labels would be readable

Two years of Gulf Coast sun destroys an adhesive label. About 180 containers had labels that were physically present and functionally illegible. We recovered most of that history from the customer's own fill records, which took a purchasing manager the better part of a week and was not in anyone's plan. Now we ask for fill records at the survey stage on any load over 200 units.

3. We did not agree the exclusion process early enough

The exclusions were in the contract. What was not in the contract was who physically moved those 46 containers back into the customer's fence and who paid for the movement. It was resolved amicably and it should never have been a conversation at all. Every asset recovery agreement we have written since names the party responsible for excluded units, by role, in one sentence.

What it diverted

1,257 containers returned to service out of 1,400 recovered — a reuse rate of 90 %, well above our yard average, because a single-source industrial load is far more consistent than mixed intake. On our published factors that is roughly 119 tonnes of CO₂e avoided against the counterfactual of the same containers being scrapped and replaced new, and about 74 tonnes of material kept out of landfill.

The customer put that figure in an annual report, with our weigh tickets attached as an appendix. That is exactly the use these numbers are for, and it is why we bother to make them traceable.