A distributor we run a fleet programme for was losing about 19% of their containers a year — 38 units out of roughly 200 in circulation — and had concluded, reasonably, that somebody was taking them.
We spent six months tracing every loss in the previous year, using serial records, delivery documentation and a considerable number of awkward phone calls. Theft was 5%, and even that is generous.
Where they went
| Destination | Units | Share | Recoverable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Still at a customer site, empty | 16 | 42% | Yes — 14 recovered |
| Repurposed internally by the customer | 9 | 24% | Partly — 4 recovered |
| In the operator's own yard, unidentified | 7 | 18% | Yes — all 7 |
| Disposed of by a third party | 4 | 11% | No |
| Genuinely unaccounted for | 2 | 5% | No |
1. Still at customer sites — the biggest category by far
Sixteen containers, sitting empty behind buildings at eleven different customer sites. In every single case the customer knew they were there and had no idea anyone wanted them back.
The container arrived full. Somebody emptied it. At that moment it stopped being product and started being an object in the way, and nobody at the receiving site had any information suggesting it should go anywhere in particular.
We thought they were ours to keep. Nobody ever said otherwise, and there was nothing on them saying so.— A customer site manager, when asked
2. Repurposed internally — the entertaining category
Nine containers found a second life without anybody's permission. Two were rainwater collection. Three were parts-washing stations. One was a very large planter. One was holding sand for winter grit. Two were being used as a barrier at the edge of a car park.
We recovered four. The planter was not negotiable and the sand had set.
3. In their own yard, unidentified — the embarrassing one
Seven containers were in the distributor's own facility the entire time, in a row of unlabelled units nobody could match to the fleet because the asset tags had come off and nobody had recorded the manufacture plates.
This is the loss category that vanishes entirely the moment you serialise against the plate rather than against a stick-on tag. Plates do not fall off. Tags do, constantly, especially after a hot wash.
4 and 5: the genuinely lost
Four containers were disposed of by third parties — two by a customer's waste contractor during a clear-out, two by a landlord after a tenant vacated. Both were preventable by the same intervention as category one: making it evident that the container belongs to somebody and is wanted back.
Two were genuinely unaccounted for. Two, out of 200, out of a year. That is a rounding error and it is not a security problem.
What changed
- Serialisation moved from applied tags to manufacture plates, with tags kept only as a human convenience.
- Every outbound container now carries a stencilled panel: returnable container, collection arranged free of charge, with an email address. Cost: about forty cents per container.
- Delivery paperwork states that the container is returnable and names the arrangement. Previously it said nothing.
- Quarterly reconciliation against the delivery record rather than annual, so a missing container is chased at ninety days rather than discovered at year end.
- Standing collection routes for the twelve customer sites that generate the most empties, so returning a container requires no phone call from anybody.
The result
Losses in the following twelve months: nine containers, or 4.5%. Down from 38. The recovered containers alone paid for the programme several times over, and the stencilling — which is the cheapest intervention on the list — accounted for more of the improvement than anything else.
The general lesson, which applies well beyond this customer: containers do not disappear. They stop being anybody's responsibility, which looks identical from a spreadsheet and is completely different in a yard.