Twelve years of diversion numbers
From 92% in 2015 to 97% in 2024. Five points in a decade sounds slow, and each one of them took a different capital project or a different rule. Here is which was which.
- Sheet
- 67
- Revision
- 2026-10
- Scale
- 1:1
- Drawn at
- Peoria IL
Diversion rate is the number we are judged on and the easiest number in this industry to flatter. Ours is calculated by mass on containers that physically left the yard in the reporting year — stock held in inventory counts as nothing, which is the conservative treatment and the reason our figure is lower than some.
| Year | Diversion | Containers | What moved it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 92% | 18,900 | First published report; rebottling line's first full year |
| 2016 | 93% | 21,400 | First pooling customer; returns are easier to divert |
| 2017 | 91% | 23,800 | A contaminated load we should have refused. Intake rules rewritten |
| 2018 | 93% | 26,000 | Fab bay opened; repurpose became a formal path |
| 2019 | 94% | 28,300 | Written-only communication; declarations improved sharply |
| 2020 | 94% | 35,600 | Sanitiser demand year; volume up 26%, rate held |
| 2021 | 95% | 31,900 | Granulator installed in house |
| 2022 | 95% | 33,400 | Circular standard published with dated commitments |
| 2023 | 95% | 36,100 | Standing lanes; fewer single-leg trips |
| 2024 | 96% | 38,700 | Serialisation completed; fewer undocumented write-offs |
What each point actually cost
- The first point (2016) was free. It came from pooling customers, whose containers return in known condition with known history.
- The second (2018) cost a fabrication shop. Repurposing exists as a path because there is a bay and a fabricator to do it.
- The third (2019) cost us our phone number. Written-only communication produced better declarations, and declarations are what keep containers out of the grinder.
- The fourth (2021) cost a granulator. Brokering scrap out meant losing visibility; doing it in house meant counting it properly.
- The fifth (2024) cost eighteen months of serialisation. It also corrected our own number downward by a point and a half, which is how we know it was worth it.
2017, in full
We accepted a mixed load from a site that could not describe half of it, on a deadline, because the customer was large and the job was urgent. Roughly 280 containers turned out to hold residue our wash bay could not process and our documentation could not characterise. All of it went to a licensed processor, properly, and about nine tons of it was landfilled as residual because that was the honest end point.
Diversion fell from 93% to 91%. We published it with the write-up, rewrote the intake rules — the no-undocumented-residue rule dates from this — and left the report in the archive. A sustainability figure you only publish when it flatters you is an advertisement, not a figure, and the only way anybody can believe 97% is if 91% is also on the shelf.
“The year the number went backwards is the only reason the other eleven mean anything.”
— Introduction to the 2017 report, still unedited
The remaining three percent
| Residual stream | 2024 tonnage | Status | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filter media | 2.1 t | No recycling route found | No plan yet — the honest gap |
| Wash sludge | 8.4 t | Licensed processor | Sludge-to-fuel partner by 2029 |
| Gasket rubber | 1.4 t | Landfilled as residual | Recyclable compound by 2028 |
| Label adhesive and backing | 0.9 t | Landfilled as residual | Adhesive-free placards by 2027 |
Three of those four have dates attached and are published in the circular standard, where a customer can audit us against them. The fourth is filter media, and every year we write the same paragraph about it: it is the largest single line in our residual stream, we have not found a processor who will take it, and we have not tried hard enough.
The full series
Eleven consecutive annual reports, including 2017. Earlier years are available on request as PDFs.