The water bill nobody includes
Every reuse story in this industry quotes avoided CO₂ and skips the washing. We ran our own numbers both ways, and the gap is big enough to change the conclusion for some operations.
- Sheet
- 88
- Revision
- 2026-10
- Scale
- 1:1
- Drawn at
- Peoria IL
Reusing a container avoids about 212 pounds of CO₂e. Washing it badly uses sixty gallons of fresh water. If you do the first four thousand times a year and the second four thousand times a year, you have a sustainability story with a hole in the middle of it.
| Approach | Fresh water per container | Where the water goes | 4,000 containers/year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open-loop pressure wash | ≈ 60 gal | Storm drain or sewer | 240,000 gal |
| Partial recovery | ≈ 22 gal | Partly sewer | 88,000 gal |
| Closed loop (ours) | 4.1 gal | Recovered, filtered, reused | 16,400 gal |
Why nobody quotes it
Because it is not a flattering number unless you have spent money on it, and because water is cheap enough in the Midwest that no commercial pressure forces the issue. The carbon figure is easy to quote and hard to check; the water figure is easy to check and expensive to improve. So the industry quotes the first one.
We are not above this — our own early years were an open-loop pressure washer in a gravel lot, and the honest description of that operation is that we were moving an environmental cost from the landfill column to the water column. The closed loop went in during 2014 and it is the single capital project we would defend hardest.
What a closed loop actually is
Capture everything
All three bays plus the paved working yard drain to a 6,000-gallon underground sump. Paving the yard was the first project after the bay, because gravel means runoff you cannot account for.
Separate
Oil-water separator, then settling chambers for solids. Sludge is drummed and manifested to a licensed processor — 8.4 tons in 2023.
Filter in two stages
25-micron bag, then 5-micron cartridge for recirculated rinse duty. Filter media is our one consumable with no recycling route, and it is the biggest line in our residual stream.
Reuse everywhere except the last rinse
Pre-rinse and detergent cycles run on recovered water. Only the final rinse draws fresh potable water, and food-grade final rinses are single-pass and never recovered into product contact.
- Caustic is neutralised and pH-verified before it enters the sump, not after.
- Make-up water covers evaporation, sludge removal and the final rinse. That is the 4.1 gallons.
- Winter operation needs heat tracing on recovery lines. We budget for it rather than switching to open-loop in January, which would be the easy cheat.
- Nothing reaches the storm system. That is the claim we would most want audited, and it has been.
What this means if you wash on site
Most companies that rinse their own containers are doing an open-loop triple rinse to drain, which is legal, common and reasonable at small volumes. The arithmetic changes at scale. If you are rinsing more than a few hundred containers a year, the water and the discharge consent become real line items, and at that point the choice is capital spend or outsourcing.
- Under ~200 containers a year: rinse on site, keep records, send them with the load. Documented rinses move your containers up a price band.
- 200 to 1,000: worth modelling. Recovery equipment is not cheap and neither is a discharge consent.
- Over 1,000: either build the loop properly or let a yard that already has one do it. Half-measures are where the water goes.
Want the water numbers for your own report?
We will send the methodology and the figures for your containers on letterhead, including what it does not account for.