Why we started publishing the number we landfill

The number nobody prints

Go and read the sustainability page of any container reconditioner, ours included until this year. You will find a diversion figure — tonnes diverted, containers saved, percentage recycled. What you will almost never find is the other half of the fraction: how much material went to landfill in the same period.

Without that number, a diversion figure is unfalsifiable. Two thousand tonnes diverted sounds impressive. Two thousand tonnes diverted against eight hundred landfilled is a mediocre operation. Two thousand against a hundred is a good one. The headline number alone cannot tell you which you are looking at, and that ambiguity is not accidental.

Ours is about four percent

When a container reaches the genuine end of its life we dismantle it, and roughly 96 % of the mass is recovered: the HDPE bottle granulated into regrind, the steel cage baled to mill, composite pallets ground with the bottle stream. The remaining 4 % is gaskets, adhesive labels, valve elastomers and residual product. That fraction is landfilled or disposed of according to its waste code, and there is currently no economic route for it.

Four percent of a large number is still a real number. Last quarter it was 101 tonnes. We print that on the sustainability page directly beneath the 2,431 tonnes we diverted, in the same size type.

What it has cost us

One sale, as far as we can tell. A procurement process where our published landfill tonnage was compared against a competitor's unpublished one and we scored lower on a rubric that had no field for "is this number real". We said so, politely, and lost anyway. That is a fair outcome of an unfair comparison and we would make the same choice again.

Against that, three things have happened that we did not expect. Two asset-recovery customers told us the landfill number was the reason they chose us — an auditor had previously rejected a supplier's diversion claim for exactly the missing-denominator reason. A regional chemical distributor asked us to help them build the same reporting internally. And our own operations team started treating the 4 % as a target rather than an inevitability, which is how we came to trial a gasket-recovery stream this autumn.

The rule we work to now

If a number in our report cannot be traced to a weigh ticket or a unit count, it does not go in the report.

That rule is written into our asset-recovery contracts and it is the reason those reports are shorter and less exciting than the ones some of our competitors produce. Every figure comes from a scale-certified weigh ticket or a counted unit. Where we estimate — and the carbon figures are estimates, because embodied emissions always are — we publish the factor and the assumption alongside the result so that anybody can rebuild the calculation or argue with it.

The whole of our environmental credibility rests on being checkable. Printing the bad number is the cheapest possible way to demonstrate that, and it turns out to be a competitive advantage roughly as often as it is a cost.