A 275-gallon caged IBC contains roughly 92 lb of steel in the cage and pallet, depending on variant. When the bottle finally fails — bulge, puncture, terminal leak-test failure — the steel is unaffected. It still has the same material value it had when the cage was made.
What recovery looks like
A bottle that fails its final leak test is removed from its cage on the disassembly line. The bottle goes to HDPE granulation. The cage is inspected for structural soundness.
A still-sound cage gets paired with a fresh bottle and put back into reconditioned inventory. (We carry replacement bottles, including new ones.) This is the highest-value recovery path: the cage continues to be a cage.
A bent or deformed cage that cannot be re-paired gets cut and baled. Steel buys per pound at a regional EAF mill, which is roughly 100% material recovery into new steel product.
The economics
A new cage costs us about $42 to source. A reused cage costs us about $4 to inspect, straighten, and repaint. The economic incentive to keep cages in service is real and we act on it: about 71% of bottle failures result in cage reuse on a different bottle.
Why this matters for sustainability
A typical “recycled” IBC, in the industry sense, means “granulated for material recovery.” A reused cage is materially better than that. The cage continues to be a cage; no melting, no remanufacturing, no embodied-energy re-investment. We track cage reuse separately from bottle reuse in our sustainability ledger because it is a separate, additive benefit.