The week we turned away four loads

Four trucks, one week

The second week of September was not unusual in volume — about 340 containers came through the gate — but it was unusual in rejections. Four separate loads went back on the truck they arrived on. That is roughly a quarter's worth of rejections compressed into five days, and when something clusters like that it is worth writing down.

None of the four sellers were trying to put one over on us. Two of them were genuinely surprised. One was annoyed enough to say so at length, which is fair — a wasted truck movement costs real money and it costs it in diesel, driver hours and a dock slot somewhere else. So it is worth being precise about why each one went back.

Load one: no labels, and no memory

Twenty-two containers off a contract packaging operation. The shipping labels had been removed — properly removed, which is normally a sign of a careful operation — and nobody on site could say what had been in them. The site had changed hands eighteen months earlier and the previous operator's records went with them.

We can take unknown-history containers. We do it constantly, we grade them C and we price them at C. What we could not do here was take twenty-two of them at the price the seller expected, because the seller had been quoted on the assumption they were food-history units. The bottles were clear, the cages were square, and they looked exactly like an A-grade lot. Appearance is not provenance.

This load did eventually come to us, three weeks later, at C-grade pricing, after the seller had tried two other yards and been told the same thing by both. That is the outcome we would have preferred on day one.

Load two: an agricultural chemical mark

Nine containers on a flatbed, from a co-op two hours out. Six of them were ordinary fertiliser-solution units. Three carried the remains of a herbicide label — enough to read the product family, not enough to read the concentration.

Agricultural pesticide and herbicide containers do not enter our general intake. Ever. They have a dedicated recovery channel with specific rinse requirements, and that channel exists precisely because these containers cannot safely re-enter the reuse market. The residues are designed to be biologically active at very low concentrations, and HDPE holds onto exactly the sort of molecules involved.

We could have taken the six good ones and left the three. We do not do that — it leaves the seller holding the half of the pile that is actually a problem — so the whole load went back with the name of the recovery programme written on the delivery note. That is not a satisfying outcome for anyone, but it is the correct one.

Load three: still full

Fourteen containers, of which four had somewhere between two and forty gallons still in them. The seller's definition of empty was "nothing pours out when you tip it". Ours is "drained through the valve, valve closed, lid on".

This matters more than it sounds. A container with residual liquid is a spill risk on the truck, a spill risk on the forklift and a genuine problem in the wash bay, where the recovery loop is calibrated for rinse water rather than for forty gallons of concentrated product. It also changes the waste classification of everything it touches.

We took the ten empty ones and left four, which is the one exception to our no-cherry-picking rule: we will not carry someone else's liquid waste. The seller drained them and we collected the four on a later run.

Load four: not theirs to sell

Thirty-one containers with a chemical distributor's asset numbers moulded into the cage plate and stencilled on two faces. These were deposit containers. The site had accumulated them over about two years and had genuinely forgotten they were leased rather than owned.

We can read a data plate and we can usually identify the owner from it, which is what we did. The containers went back to their actual owner, the site recovered its deposits, and everybody ended up better off than if we had bought them — including us, because buying containers somebody else holds title to is a category of problem you only need once.

If a container has somebody's name moulded into it, the first question is not what it is worth. The first question is whose it is.

What we changed afterwards

Three of the four rejections could have been avoided before the truck was loaded, which means the failure was ours as much as the sellers'. We now ask for four photographs before we commit to any collection: the stack, one bottle interior through the lid, one valve, and one data plate. That last one catches deposit containers and unreadable marks in a single frame.

• Four photographs required before any collection is scheduled, no exceptions above six units.
• The words "drained through the valve, valve closed, lid on" now appear on every collection confirmation.
• Agricultural chemical exclusions are stated in the first reply, not discovered at the gate.
• Where a data plate shows a third-party asset number, we say so before quoting rather than after.

Rejections have not gone to zero and they never will. But four in a week has not happened since, and the last two years' worth have almost all been the unavoidable kind — the load that genuinely could not have been assessed from photographs.