We buy them, pay you for them, pick them up, wash them, rebuild them, haul them, cut them up, grind them down and document all of it. One yard, ten services, no brokering.
If you have empties stacking up behind the building, they are not waste — they are inventory somebody else needs. We pay for them, load them ourselves, and tell you exactly where they went.
Empties are a space problem before they are a money problem. We clear them out on our own equipment — including the awkward ones stacked three high in a corner behind a rack.
Reconditioning is where the environmental math actually happens. A rebottled tote reuses roughly 60% of the original container by weight — the entire steel cage and pallet — while costing a fraction of new.
Washing a tote uses water. Washing it badly wastes water twice — once in the rinse and once again when the container gets scrapped anyway. Our wash bay recovers 96% of what it uses and documents every cycle.
Totes are awkward freight: tall, top-heavy when full, and easy to crush when empty. We haul them for a living, which means fewer damaged cages and no surprise reconsignment fees.
Recycling is our second choice, not our first — every tote we grind is a tote we could not save. But when a bottle is cracked or chemically spent, grinding it back to pellet beats every alternative by a wide margin.
Buying totes forever is a strange way to run a packaging line. In the pooling program you hold a float of containers, we keep them clean and whole, and the ones that fail get replaced without a purchase order.
Half the totes that leave our yard are not totes anymore. They are rain harvesters, aquaponics beds, wash stations, grain hoppers and dunk tanks. If you can sketch it on a napkin, our fab bay has probably already built it.
The containers are easy. The paperwork is what gets companies fined. We keep the declarations, the cleaning records and the destruction certificates in one place so an inspection is boring.
Most companies have no idea whether the totes behind their building are worth $8 or $95 each. An hour of grading usually changes the answer by five figures.
Every service exists to keep a container one rung higher on the waste hierarchy than it would otherwise land. That is the organising principle, not a marketing frame.
Inspection & grading, triple-rinse washing, transport. The container goes straight back into service.
Reconditioning and rebottling. Sixty percent of the container by weight is reused.
Custom fabrication. The container stops being a tote and becomes something that lasts another decade.
Recycling and regrind, plus documented compliance disposal for the small fraction that is regulated.
The Loop Lab asks three questions about your container and names the service, the grade and the environmental arithmetic.
| Your situation | Service | What it costs you | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empties stacking up behind the building | We buy your totes | Nothing — we pay you | 5–8 days |
| A deadline and 400 containers in the way | Pickup & removal | Free on qualifying loads | 72 hr emergency |
| Containers with dead bottles | Reconditioning | About half of replacement | 1–2 weeks |
| Containers that need a documented clean | Triple-rinse washing | Per cycle, per unit | Same week |
| Containers to move, either direction | Transport & logistics | Free on lanes, quoted off them | 3–9 days |
| Containers nothing can save | Recycling & regrind | Scrap credit | With the next lane |
| Seasonal demand and idle capacity | Fleet & pooling | Monthly per unit in service | 2–4 weeks to seed |
| An idea on a napkin | Custom fabrication | Fixed price per build | 3–10 days |
| Residue nobody will describe | Compliance & disposal | Characterisation, then quoted | Varies |
| No idea what any of it is worth | Inspection & grading | Free when we buy the load | 24 hr on photos |
That is the cheapest way to work with us. A swap run delivers reconditioned containers and collects your empties on the same stop: one bill of lading, one invoice, one diversion statement, and the freight is already paid for by the outbound leg.
No for photo grading, and no for an on-site grading visit on loads we end up buying. A yard walk where we do not buy is quoted, and it is rarely more than a few hundred dollars.
One container through the fab bay, four for local delivery, twelve for free collection on a lane. Inside sixty miles of Peoria there is no minimum at all.
Yes, with one condition in writing: we will not support a resale described as a grade higher than the one we sold. That has cost us a handful of accounts and kept the rest.
Toll processing — washing, rebottling, fabrication — on your own serials, returned to you with records rather than entering our inventory. Common with branded fleets and pooled assets.
We say so and name who can. About 7% of enquiries are not ours — acute hazardous residue, restricted-use pesticide containers, TSCA material — and the referral is free.