Anatomy of a shutdown clearout
A plant closes, a lease ends, and 400 containers have to be gone by a Friday with paperwork that will satisfy a landlord, an auditor and probably a lawyer. This is the job we are best at.
- Sheet
- 45
- Revision
- 2026-10
- Scale
- 1:1
- Drawn at
- Peoria IL
Shutdown work is the only part of this business where the customer's problem is not containers. It is a date, and the containers are in the way of it.
The pattern is consistent. Somebody — a plant manager, a facilities lead, occasionally an administrator — inherits a yard full of containers accumulated over a decade by people who have already left, and a deadline set by a lease, a sale or a demolition contractor. Nobody knows what is in most of them. Everybody needs it documented.
Day one is always the same
Count and segregate
Walk the site and sort into four piles: known contents, known-and-regulated, unknown, and structurally dead. The unknown pile is always bigger than anybody expected.
Sample the unknowns
A grader can identify most residues on site. What cannot be identified goes to a licensed partner for characterisation, and we say so in writing rather than guessing.
Split the job
Containers we can buy, containers we will haul for a fee, and containers that are not ours to take at all. Being clear about the third category on day one is what keeps a shutdown from becoming a dispute.
Schedule against the deadline
Shutdown loads are sequenced against the Friday, not against our lane calendar. That is the whole reason to hire somebody for this.
| Pile | Typical share | What happens | Who pays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Known contents, sound | 54% | We buy and collect | We pay you |
| Known contents, structurally dead | 22% | Collected for regrind | Scrap band, small credit |
| Unknown contents | 17% | Characterised, then routed | Varies; often a fee |
| Regulated residue | 7% | Licensed partner, not us | Specialist pricing |
The paperwork, because that is the actual product
- One consolidated diversion statement for the whole clearout: counts by grade, destination path per stream, estimated landfill avoided by mass.
- A bill of lading per load, with placarding reviewed before dispatch rather than at the gate.
- Last-contents declarations for everything we take, signed by the site — we will help reconstruct them from labels and plant records where the original is gone.
- Certificates of destruction with weights and photographs for brand-protected or contaminated units.
- A written statement of what we refused and why, which is the document landlords and auditors actually ask for.
“The customer thinks they are buying a truck. They are buying a file.”
— What we tell new staff about shutdown work
What makes a shutdown go badly
- Being told about it a week before the deadline. We hold 72-hour emergency capacity but it costs more and the documentation gets rushed, which is exactly backwards.
- A demolition contractor who starts before the containers are out and parks equipment in the only turning space.
- Nobody on site with authority to sign a declaration. We cannot haul what nobody will describe.
- An assumption that we will take everything. Seven percent of a typical shutdown is genuinely not ours — acute hazardous residue, restricted-use pesticide containers, TSCA material — and discovering that on the Thursday is painful.
- Containers full of product. Those need licensed disposal of the contents first; the empty container is then an ordinary job.
Clearing a site on a deadline?
Put the date in the message field. Shutdown and lease-end loads get scheduled against the deadline, not the queue.