Selling containers you do not own

How this happens

A great many chemical suppliers ship in containers they retain title to. You pay a deposit, or you pay nothing and the container remains theirs, and the arrangement is that empties go back on the next delivery. It is a sensible model — it is essentially the same as a gas cylinder — and it works well when everybody remembers.

What happens instead, repeatedly, is that a site accumulates empties in a back corner over two or three years. The purchasing manager who set up the arrangement leaves. The supplier changes. Somebody eventually decides the yard needs clearing and calls a container buyer.

At that point, a company is offering to sell an asset it does not own, generally with no idea that this is what is happening. About one container in forty that comes across our buy-back desk is in this category.

How to spot one

• An asset number that is not the manufacturer's serial. Usually stencilled or on a riveted tag, often sequential, often with a company prefix.
• A company name moulded into the bottle or stencilled on two or more faces. Moulded branding is the strongest signal — nobody moulds a name into a container they intend to sell on.
• A barcode or RFID tag that is clearly aftermarket.
• Colour coding that does not match anything the manufacturer offers — a supplier-specific valve handle colour, for instance.
• A "return to" address on the cage plate area.
• Consistency across the stack. Forty identical containers with sequential numbers is a fleet, not an accumulation.

What we do

1. We identify the owner from the plate, the moulding or the asset number. We can usually do this in a few minutes — there are not that many companies running container fleets in this region and we know most of them.
2. We tell the seller, before quoting, that some or all of the load appears to belong to a third party.
3. We give them the owner's name and, where we have it, the contact for their container recovery programme.
4. We do not buy them. Not at a discount, not with a disclaimer, not on the basis that the seller signs something. Buying containers somebody else holds title to is a category of problem you only need to encounter once.
5. If the rest of the load is clean, we buy that and leave the deposit containers. This is the second exception to our no-cherry-picking rule.

In most cases the seller then recovers deposits they had forgotten they were owed, which is frequently more than we would have paid for the containers. That has happened enough times that it is a genuinely good outcome rather than a consolation.

If you are the supplier

The deposit model leaks. Every fleet operator we work with loses containers at somewhere between 4 % and 11 % a year, and almost all of that loss is accumulation at customer sites rather than theft or damage.

• Mould or stencil your name on at least two faces. Adhesive labels do not survive a Texas summer and a container with no visible ownership will be sold within three years.
• Put a return contact on the container itself, not just in a document. The person clearing the yard has never read the document.
• Run a periodic sweep rather than relying on customer initiative. A quarterly email listing outstanding containers per site recovers more than any deposit structure.
• Talk to a recovery partner. We run take-back programmes precisely for this, and identifying and returning your containers when they turn up is something we do for free because it is obviously the right thing.
• Consider whether the deposit is high enough to be noticed. A deposit that is smaller than the cost of arranging the return will be abandoned every time.