41,200 containers, from the seat
Our 2025 report says 41,200 containers handled, 97% diverted, 3,380 metric tons of CO₂e avoided. Here is the same year described by the person who physically moved most of it.
- Sheet
- 96
- Revision
- 2026-10
- Scale
- 1:1
- Drawn at
- Peoria IL
Forty-one thousand two hundred containers is a number from a report. One hundred and sixty-five containers a day, every working day, each one handled about four times, is the same fact described by somebody who had to do it.
| Stage | Touches | Why | Time per container |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unload and stage at intake | 1 | Off the truck, into a grading row | ~45 sec |
| Grading line | 1 | Eighteen checks, photographs, sticker | 2–4 min |
| To wash, rebottle or fab | 1 | Sorted by path | ~40 sec |
| Rack or load out | 1 | Into inventory or onto a truck | ~50 sec |
Where the day actually goes
About eleven miles of forklift travel across a four-acre yard, which sounds absurd until you count the trips. The single biggest operational improvement we have made in five years was not equipment — it was changing the yard layout so that containers move in one direction from the gate to the rack, with no backtracking. A container that has to be re-handled is a container losing money and emitting carbon for no reason.
- Intake pad nearest the gate, because unloading a truck fast is how you keep a lane on schedule.
- Grading line next, under fixed lighting, because grading in bad light is how you create a dispute.
- Wash bays and rebottling bench in the middle, so sorted containers go left or right rather than back.
- Fab bay and granulator at the far end, because those are terminal paths.
- Racking and load-out on the outbound side, so a finished container never crosses the yard twice.
The 2025 year in physical terms
| Report figure | What it was physically |
|---|---|
| 41,200 containers handled | 165 per working day, roughly 660 individual lifts |
| 23,896 reused as-is | Washed, inspected, racked — the busy half of the yard |
| 8,652 rebottled | About 35 a day on the bench, 40 minutes each of skilled work |
| 2,472 repurposed | 10 a day through the fab bay, mostly harvesters and planters |
| 4,944 recycled | 20 a day through the granulator, 504 tons of regrind out |
| 1,142,000 gal water used | 4,600 gallons a day cycling through the sump |
| 97% diversion | Four residual streams, 12.8 tons, mostly consumables |
| 3,380 t CO₂e avoided | Not visible from the seat at all — which is the point of publishing it |
That last row is the honest tension in this business. Nothing about the environmental benefit is visible on the pad. What is visible is containers, straps, water, and a granulator we would rather not run. The arithmetic is real and it is also entirely abstract from where the work happens, which is why we publish the methodology rather than just the headline.
Three things that surprised us in the data
- Grading is the bottleneck, not washing. Two to four minutes per container on the grading line is more total time than the wash bay consumes, because washing runs in parallel and grading does not.
- The rebottling bench is our highest-value square footage. Thirty-five containers a day at roughly half the cost of replacement, each one saving 162 lb of CO₂e. If we expand anything, it is that bench.
- Repurposing is small and growing fastest. Six percent of throughput, up from nothing before the fab bay existed in 2018, and it absorbs exactly the containers that would otherwise be ground up.
Come and see it
Yard visits by appointment, weekday mornings, closed-toe shoes. Several customers have changed their own specifications after an hour on the pad.