The economics of taking the scrap too

The practice we are arguing against

A buyer arrives at a site with forty containers. Twenty-six are sound and resaleable, nine are marginal, five are scrap. The buyer offers a good price for the twenty-six, loads them, and leaves.

From the buyer's point of view this is entirely rational: the twenty-six are worth money, the fourteen cost money to process, and nobody is obliged to take a loss. From the seller's point of view they have just been left holding the half of the pile that was actually the problem, and they will now pay someone else to remove it.

We price the whole stack, including the scrap. That is a policy from 2014 and it costs us real money on individual loads.

What it costs

Twenty-seven dollars a load. Across roughly 900 buy-back loads a year that is about $24,000 annually, which is not trivial and is also not the disaster people assume when we describe the policy.

The reason it is small is the last row but one: scrap containers are not worthless. Thirty-nine pounds of clean natural HDPE and sixty-six pounds of steel is real material, and once you own a granulator and a baler you capture most of it. Before 2020 this policy genuinely did cost us — the numbers were closer to $70 a load. Owning the recovery line is what made the position affordable.

What it earns

We finally have enough history to answer this properly, because we have tracked repeat rates by seller since 2019.

We cannot honestly fill the right-hand column — we do not have competitors' data and we are not going to invent it. What we can say is that 68 % repeat and 23 % referral are both high for a transactional business, and that when we ask sellers why they came back, "you took the whole lot" is the most common answer by a wide margin. It comes up more often than price.

The two exceptions

The policy is not absolute, and honesty requires naming where it bends.

1. Containers with liquid still in them. We will not carry somebody else's liquid waste, and this is a legal and safety question rather than a commercial one. Drain them and we will come back.
2. Containers that are not the seller's to sell. Deposit and leased containers stay where they are and we tell the seller who owns them.

Excluded chemistry — agricultural pesticides, listed hazardous waste — is a third case, but that is a whole-load refusal rather than a cherry-pick. We do not take the good half of a load with a herbicide problem in it either.