MenuIBC Second LifeReuse · Recondition · ReclaimRequest Quote
Chapter 01 · How we got here

A story about a tote
nobody wanted.

In the fall of 2016, a perfectly serviceable 330-gallon IBC tote got loaded into a dumpster behind a soybean co-op outside Boonville. That tote — and the eleven that followed it that month — is the reason this company exists.

Get a quote · Ask a question

Tell us a bit about what you need. We respond within one business day. No phone tag — we work email-first.

Email-first · 1 business day
01You
US or Canada only · format: (555) 123-4567
02Where
03Your project
By submitting you agree to our privacy policy. No phone calls — email only, response within one business day.

Riley was a packaging engineer doing a circular-economy audit for a regional food co-packer. Theo was a farm-equipment mechanic who had spent fifteen years cobbling together rain catchment, ag spray rigs, and small-batch fuel storage out of whatever IBC totes the local seed plant was throwing out that month.

They met because the co-packer's sustainability director introduced them. The conversation, paraphrased: "The dealers don't want sub-pallet quantities. The recyclers don't want plastic with anything in it. We pay for forty totes a month to go to landfill. Do you know anyone who can solve this?"

The first six months

They started with one borrowed flatbed and a phone tree of farmers, co-packers, and feed mills within a ninety-mile radius of Columbia. The premise was the same one we still operate under: pick up the totes nobody else will quote. Clean them, sort them, sell them at a price that respects both buyer and seller. Recycle whatever cannot be saved.

By month six they had moved 412 totes. By the end of the first year, just over 3,400. Most of them stayed within 200 miles of where they started.

Why we don't have a phone

A small business with no salaried receptionist and three field operators ends up with one person answering the phone — and that one person is also driving, loading, or quoting. Phones get ignored. Voicemails pile up. Customers feel like they're being avoided. The whole thing becomes a worse experience for everyone.

We made a choice early: every quote, every pickup, every freight estimate starts in writing. Email is searchable. Email is honest. Email does not interrupt the person trying to load your totes. Every quote you get from us has a paper trail. Every commitment is in writing.

"We were nervous about it. Then we realized our customers actually preferred it. Nobody likes being on hold."

What changed in 2021

We added the wash bay. It is not glamorous — a 40' concrete pad with hot-water cleaning, gasket and valve replacement stations, and a small QA bench for batch certifying food-grade units. But it changed what we could offer. Suddenly we weren't just a clearing-house for someone else's used totes; we were a reconditioning operation.

That same year, we started cutting and welding custom configurations: cut-top totes for rainwater, raised-bed cages for community gardens, two-tote cascade systems for aquaponics builders. Most of these started as one customer's weird request and turned into a regular product line.

What hasn't changed

  • We still pay for pickup at twelve totes.
  • We still answer email first, second, and third.
  • We still refuse to sell food-grade without a wash record.
  • We still recycle every tote that cannot be saved — with documentation.

The premise from 2017 is the premise today: the IBC tote is too good a container to throw away, and there is plenty of work left in the gap between what the dealers will quote and what the recyclers will haul. We're still here, doing that work.

Read the Sustainability Charter →

Year by year

The longer timeline.

Fall 2016

The tote in the dumpster

Riley, on a Tuesday morning audit at a soybean co-op outside Boonville, watches a forklift drop a perfectly serviceable 330-gallon tote into a roll-off. The plant manager shrugs: nobody picks them up under a half-truck. By the end of the month, eleven more follow. That is the moment the napkin math starts.

Spring 2017

The borrowed flatbed

Theo has a friend in Centralia with a 24-foot gooseneck and a tractor he is not using on Tuesdays. We rent it for $80 a day. We move twenty-eight totes in the first week. The friend eventually sells us the trailer.

July 2017

The yard, such as it is

We sign a one-year lease on a gravel pad on Vandiver Drive. The first week, a thunderstorm reveals that the pad is, technically, a low spot. We move the totes to higher ground. We are still on Vandiver — different pad.

2018

The first repeat customer

A dairy operation outside Sedalia buys twelve, then twelve more, then forty. We finally believe this is a business and not a hobby. Riley quits the consulting work.

2019

The zero-landfill commitment

We sit down at a kitchen table in Moberly with the third-generation owner of the iron yard and write the cage-scrap agreement on a legal pad. The HDPE granulator in St. Louis signs three weeks later. Since this year, no tote of ours has gone to landfill.

2020

The year we learned to triage

Calls — emails — about potable water totes and sanitizer storage triple in March. We end up writing a public "please be patient, we are three people" note. Everyone is patient. Most of them are still customers.

2021

The wash bay

40 feet of poured concrete, a hot-water unit secondhand from a car wash that closed in Mexico (Missouri), a gasket bench Theo built out of an old work table. Priya joins us in September after Riley sees a talk she gave at a recycling conference in Springfield.

2022

Custom configurations become a real line

Cut-tops for rainwater. Raised-bed cages. Two-tote cascade kits. A community garden in north Columbia orders fourteen raised beds in a single email. We realize we should put these on the website.

2023

Impact accounting

Priya builds the per-order impact footnote. Pounds diverted, CO₂e avoided, water saved. We start putting it on every invoice. Sustainability teams begin emailing us asking for the methodology — which is on the sustainability page.

2024

The site you're reading

We finally retire the WordPress-with-three-plugins site. The one you're reading is what replaced it. It loads in under a second on bad rural broadband, which was the only design brief.

2025–2026

Still three people

41,000+ totes returned to service since 2017. We had several conversations about hiring a fourth in 2025. We decided to invest in better software and an extra owner-operator on the freight side instead. Maybe next year.

Formative incidents

Three days we still talk about.

Day one

The tote in the dumpster

The story we tell at every dinner. Riley still has the photo on her phone. The tote was full-cage, valve intact, less than a year old. It cost the co-op $48 to dispose of. We would have paid them for it.

Day two

The midnight call from a brewery

2019, around 11 p.m. on a Friday. A small Columbia brewery has a leaking glycol loop and needs an emergency 330-gallon receiver before the chiller dies. Theo drives one over in the F-250 at midnight. They've been a customer for seven years. We did not charge them for that one.

Day three

The audit we failed on purpose

A national co-packer wanted us to label a batch food-grade without a wash record because "we'll re-wash on our end." We declined the order. Their procurement lead emailed back two weeks later asking if we could quote a real food-grade batch. We could. We did.

How we hired #3

The Priya hire.

We did not post a job. We did not interview. Riley went to a regional recycling conference in Springfield in May 2021 to give a short talk about food-grade wash protocols. Priya gave the talk after Riley's — on chain-of-custody documentation for HDPE recovery streams. They had coffee. Riley emailed her two weeks later.

Priya started in September. Within six months she had rewritten our recycling documentation from scratch, set up the per-load weight-ticket tracking, and re-negotiated our terms with the St. Louis granulator. The impact footnote on your invoice is hers.

We are not going to pretend this is a scalable hiring process. It worked because we were small enough to bet the whole roster on one person, and because Priya was generous enough to take the bet.

Building the wash bay

2021, by the numbers.

Concrete poured
40 ft × 16 ft slab, 6" thick, sloped 1.5%
Drain
Oil-water separator into municipal sewer, permitted
Hot-water unit
Secondhand from a closed car wash in Mexico, MO
Detergent
Food-grade alkaline from Boone Industrial
Sanitizer
Peracetic acid, batch-recorded
Total cost
$38,400, including permits and the secondhand boiler
Capacity
~24 totes per shift, two shifts per week
Payback
14 months on incremental food-grade margin

Pandemic-era expansion

The spring of 2020 doubled our demand and halved our reaction time. Schools and small municipalities were suddenly building potable-water storage. Small distilleries were pivoting to hand sanitizer and needed clean, food-grade totes by the truckload. Backyard rainwater systems went vertical.

We did not have a plan. We had a spreadsheet, three people, and one trailer. What we did have was a list of every customer we'd ever served, sorted by region, and a willingness to write a hundred-and-forty emails a day. We routed loads in clusters of four-and-five-stop pickups, did emergency overnight washes, and got into the habit — kept ever since — of replying to every email within four business hours, even if the reply is "we are working on it."

Lessons we actually learned

  • Triage beats throughput. A three-person team that says no to the wrong orders moves more product than a three-person team that says yes to everything.
  • Routes are written down or they are not real. A pickup that lives only in someone's head will eventually get dropped.
  • The wash bay was the right investment. It moved us from being a clearing-house to being a real reconditioning operation. Every dollar of bay margin compounds.
  • Customers will wait if you tell them the truth. "Two weeks out" is a real answer. "We'll see" is not.
  • Three is the right number for us. Probably. We reserve the right to change our minds.

What's next

Honestly, more of the same. A fourth person, eventually. A second wash bay if demand for food-grade keeps climbing. Maybe a Kansas City satellite if our western route density justifies it. We are not in a hurry. We have a customer book that grows about 18% a year through word of mouth, and a yard that is the right size for the work.

The premise from 2017 is the premise today. The tote in the dumpster is still a problem. We are still here, picking it up.

Common questions

About the story.

Is the tote-in-the-dumpster story real?
Yes. Riley still has the photo. It was a 330-gallon composite tote, full cage, valve still installed, less than a year old. The co-op manager was apologetic but had been told by their dealer that under a half-truck wasn't worth quoting.
Why Columbia, MO specifically?
Because that's where Riley and Theo lived. There are tax-and-incentive reasons we could invent in hindsight, but the truth is geography: Columbia is roughly equidistant from St. Louis, Kansas City, Des Moines, and Little Rock. We did not plan it. We benefit from it.
Are Riley and Theo related? Married?
No to both. They are business partners who met because a sustainability director introduced them. They are also pretty different people, which we think is part of why this works.
What did you do before this?
Riley was a packaging engineer for a regional food co-packer. Theo was a farm-equipment mechanic, mostly working on Case IH and Kinze planters. Priya was a coordinator at a plastics recovery facility in Springfield. None of us went to school for this.
Have you ever taken outside investment?
No. We've been profitable since month nine. We have a small line of credit at a Columbia bank for seasonal working capital and that is the extent of our outside money.
Will you ever get a phone?
No.
Where can I read the technical sustainability methodology?
On the Sustainability Charter page. The math is laid out step by step with assumptions.
Next chapter

How we live the values.

The five non-negotiable charters and the cradle-to-cradle math behind them.

Sustainability charter →
Request Quote