Food grade, rinsed
Clear or natural bottle, food-safe last contents, legible UN markings, no stains. These leave our yard the same week they arrive.
Service 01 — Buying
We buy your totes
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.
- Sheet
- 84
- Revision
- 2026-10
- Scale
- 1:1
- Drawn at
- Peoria IL
$8–$95Paid per tote
12Minimum load
48 hrTypical quote turnaround
97%Diverted from landfill
Four conditions, four price bands
Price is driven by the last contents, the bottle, the cage and whether the tote can be rebottled. We quote all four bands off photos, so nothing changes when the truck shows up.
Industrial, clean
Non-hazardous last contents, triple-rinsed, cosmetic scuffing fine. The biggest band by volume and the easiest to move.
Stained or dented
Still watertight, still useful for non-potable work. We buy these for washing, rebottling and upcycle builds.
Cage only / scrap
Cracked bottle, failed valve, mystery residue. We still take it: cage gets reused, bottle becomes regrind. We just pay scrap.
Not sure what you have?
Send four photos — placard, valve, top fitting and a wide shot of the stack. We grade them in a day and quote a per-tote price with the pickup window attached.
From stacked-up to paid in four moves
01
Tell us the count
Quantity, last contents and dock access. That is the whole intake.
02
We grade remotely
Photos go to the same grader who will inspect them on arrival, so the number holds.
03
We load out
Our flatbed, our straps, our labor. You keep your forklift on your own work.
04
You get paid + papers
Payment on pickup or net-15, plus a diversion statement for your ESG file.
What we will not buy
- Totes that last held acutely hazardous waste, pesticides in restricted-use classes, or anything requiring a licensed TSDF.
- Containers with their UN markings ground off or painted over — without the code, the tote cannot legally re-enter service.
- Unrinsed totes with unknown residue. We can arrange cleaning, but we cannot buy the unknown.
- Anything you do not own outright. Leased pool totes belong to the pool; we will help you return them instead.
“A tote is the rare piece of industrial packaging that can live four or five lives. Burying one at life two is a design failure, not a disposal decision.”
— Yard floor rule #1
Selling totes, answered
Do you charge for pickup if I am selling to you?
No. On qualifying loads — generally 12 totes or more within our 300-mile radius — pickup is free and comes off the same route that delivers reconditioned units.
How fast can you be here?
Most Illinois, Iowa, Indiana and Missouri pickups land within 5–8 business days. Peoria-area loads are often same-week because the yard is here.
Can you buy totes that still have product in them?
Not as-is. We can coordinate licensed disposal of the remaining product first, then buy the empty container. That keeps your generator status clean.
What paperwork do I get?
A per-load diversion statement with tote counts by grade, destination path (reuse, rebottle or regrind) and estimated landfill avoided in pounds.
What moves the number we quote you
| Factor | Effect on price | Why | Can you change it? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documented last contents | +30–60% | Without it the container cannot re-enter product service | Yes — write it down |
| Legible UN plate | +30–60% | An anonymous container is out of regulated service permanently | Photograph it, never paint it |
| Documented rinse | +1 price band | Saves us a cycle and proves the residue | Yes — send the records |
| Indoor storage history | +1 band typical | UV plus flex is what crazes a bottle | Partly |
| Count on one site | Better per-unit | One stop instead of four | Yes — consolidate |
| Matching sizes stacked | Better freight | Mixed heights halve what a trailer carries | Yes — stage by height |
| Valve present and capped | Small premium | Correlates with everything else being cared for | Yes |
| Resin market | Moves bands quarterly | Regrind and new-container prices set the floor and ceiling | No |
| Season | Up to 24% across a year | Our inventory peaks in January and empties in May | Yes — time it |
- Write down the last contents by product name and concentration, even informally. This is the single highest-value thing you can do before selling containers to anybody.
- Photograph the UN plate straight on, in daylight, before anything else happens to the container.
- Rinse if you can and keep the record — a documented rinse often moves a container up a band by more than the rinse cost.
- Stage by size and keep them off bare ground. Base-rail rust is the one cage failure with no repair path.
- Consolidate to twelve or more and the pickup is free; inside sixty miles of Peoria there is no minimum at all.
This is the condition we expect
Nobody needs to clean containers up before we look at them. Stains are cosmetic, weathering is normal, and a yard that has been accumulating empties for two years is exactly the job we want. What changes the price is not how they look — it is whether you can tell us what was in them and how they have been stored.