Keep good hardware
in circulation.
Our mission, in one line: every IBC tote that comes through our gate gets the longest useful life we can give it before any material recovery happens. Everything else flows from that.
Same-day reply.
Every form goes straight to a human in Green Bay — no chatbots, no offshore desks. Mon–Fri responses within four working hours.
Small unromantic decisions.
A value statement is a poster, not a policy. The decisions that actually matter happen in unglamorous places.
- We turn down truckloads of empties when the prior contents aren’t documented. The price is right, the tote is fine, but we won’t pollute our food-grade pool with mystery.
- Our gaskets are NSF-certified even on industrial-grade rebuilds. Costs us $1.40 a tote. Means a customer can use the same tote for a food run two years from now without re-gasketing.
- We pay for empties at our gate. Many competitors get them free. Paying for inventory gets us better inventory.
- We won’t sell a tote that failed our leak test, even at scrap pricing. Once it fails, it goes to the granulator. Period.
Eight policies we don’t bend.
- POLICY 01
No undocumented intake
Every truckload comes with a prior-contents manifest. No paper, no sale.
- POLICY 02
Food line stays food line
No exception, no “just this once,” no shortcuts when a deadline is tight.
- POLICY 03
Leak test on every reconditioned tote
3 PSI, 5 minutes. The day we skip this is the day we stop being us.
- POLICY 04
New ball valve on every reconditioned tote
Twelve dollars and a customer who never weeps in service. Easy math.
- POLICY 05
W-2 drivers, owned trucks
No broker stack between us and the load.
- POLICY 06
Same-day email response (4 hour SLA)
During business hours. Same human across the thread.
- POLICY 07
Annual third-party safety audit
Yard, electrical, wash chemistry. We pay; the auditor names problems.
- POLICY 08
No greenwashing
Numbers in the sustainability report are measured, not modeled.
Words people use around totes.
- Intake
- The first 24 hours after a tote arrives at our gate. Photo, log, sort.
- Triage
- The decision tree that routes a tote to reconditioning, repurposing, or material recovery.
- Segregation
- Physical separation between our food-grade and industrial wash lines. Not a hallway; a different building.
- Closed-loop water
- Process water recaptured, filtered, and reused. 84% recovery at our yard.
- Serial trail
- The per-tote record from intake to outbound. Auditable on demand.
- Yellow tag
- A pull-anything-out-of-flow tag any operator can place on a tote that looks off.
- Chain of custody
- Documented evidence of who handled a tote, when, and under what conditions.
- RCRA listed
- Federally tracked hazardous waste classes we do not touch, period.
The ones people ask after their first reply.
Do your values mean you charge more?
A little. We pay better-than-market wages, run a heavier QA program, and turn down some business. That shows up as roughly a 6–10% per-tote premium over the cheapest reconditioners in the market. Customers who price-shop us once usually understand the gap; the customers who do not, find us again later.
Are you open to investment or acquisition?
No. Founders own the company. We have turned down four offers since 2021. The plan is to stay employee-led and to transition ownership to a long-tenure ESOP structure over the next decade.
Why no public phone number?
Our internal data showed 93% of inbound calls were better handled by email. We removed the line and added a 4-hour email SLA. Customer satisfaction went up, not down. Full write-up here.
Do you take on apprentices or trainees?
Yes. We host two apprenticeship slots a year through Northeast Wisconsin Technical College’s industrial-maintenance program. Inquiries to info@ibcreconditioned.com.
Values are nice. The wash floor is louder.
Come walk the yard. The values look like specific people doing specific things in a specific building. You can see all of it.