Rebottling economics: the spreadsheet we show customers

The four options

You own 200 containers. The cages are broadly sound; the bottles are hazed, odorous or stained enough that they are no longer suitable for what you are filling them with. What do you do?

Rebottling your own fleet comes out below buying reconditioned, and you keep containers whose history you already know. Most customers do not consider it, because it is not something you can put in a shopping cart.

The resin credit

This is the line nobody expects. Your old bottles are not waste — they are about 39 lb each of clean, single-polymer, natural HDPE, which is a genuinely saleable commodity. At 200 units that is 7,800 lb, and at 2025 regrind prices for clean natural material that is somewhere between $1,500 and $2,400 depending on the month.

We credit that against the rebottle invoice rather than keeping it, for the straightforward reason that it is your material. Yards that do not mention it are not defrauding anyone — the material is being recycled either way — but you are giving away roughly 13 % of the job cost by not asking.

When rebottling your own does not work

• When the cages have gone. If more than about a fifth of your fleet fails cage inspection, the survey and handling cost per usable unit climbs fast and the arithmetic flips toward buying rebottled stock.
• When you need them immediately. Rebottling your own fleet means shipping them to us, processing, and shipping back — realistically three to four weeks door to door. Buying from stock is three to seven days.
• When the fleet is small. Below about 40 units the freight in both directions eats the advantage.
• When you are changing specification anyway. If you are moving from 275s to 330s, or from composite pallets to steel, there is nothing to preserve.
• When the containers are branded with something you no longer use. Rebottling keeps the cage, and the cage is where the stencilling is.

How to work out which you are

1. Pull twenty containers at random. Not the best twenty — at random, or the survey is worthless.
2. Check each cage: diagonals equal within about half an inch, no cracked welds, all four pallet feet present, deck sound.
3. Count how many pass. If it is seventeen or more out of twenty, rebottling your own is almost certainly your cheapest route.
4. Fourteen to sixteen: marginal. Worth a proper survey.
5. Below fourteen: buy rebottled stock and sell us your fleet for the material value.

We will do that twenty-unit survey on your site for nothing within our own delivery footprint, and give you the pass rate and a number, with no expectation that you use us for the work. It takes about ninety minutes and it settles the question.