The granulator sits at the back of the yard behind the wash bay, it is loud, and it is where containers go when every better option has genuinely been exhausted. In 2023 it processed 8.1% of our intake by unit count and produced 380,400 lb of washed regrind. This is the annual accounting we give any customer who asks, published because it is easier than emailing it forty times.
What went in
| Reason | Containers | Share | HDPE recovered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stress cracking / crazing | 612 | 41% | 155,200 lb |
| Freeze split | 244 | 16% | 61,900 lb |
| Contamination beyond wash | 203 | 14% | 51,500 lb |
| Bottle deformation | 171 | 11% | 43,300 lb |
| Cage failure, bottle retired with it | 148 | 10% | 37,500 lb |
| No prior-contents record + poor condition | 118 | 8% | 31,000 lb |
| Total | 1,496 | 100% | 380,400 lb |
The steel went separately: 231,000 lb of cages and bases, baled by grade and sold to a regional mill. Steel recycling is uncomplicated and almost invisible in this industry because the scrap value alone guarantees nobody landfills it.
Where the regrind went
- Corrugated drainage pipe — the largest single destination, roughly 44% by weight.
- Electrical and telecoms conduit — around 21%.
- Injection-moulded pallets and crates — around 18%.
- Agricultural film and sheet — around 11%.
- Miscellaneous non-food packaging — the remaining 6%.
These are unglamorous products and that is the point. Post-industrial regrind from mixed sources is a workhorse material. It is not going into a yoghurt pot and it should not be.
What we will not claim
Three things, stated plainly because the recycling trade generates a lot of comfortable vagueness:
- Our regrind is not food-contact suitable. The input stream is mixed industrial and no amount of washing gives it a provenance it does not have. Any processor telling you otherwise about mixed post-industrial IBC regrind is selling a story.
- Recycling is not as good as reuse and we will not present it as equivalent. Granulating a container recovers roughly 34% of the embodied burden of manufacturing its replacement. Washing it and putting it back into service recovers essentially all of it.
- Closed loop is the wrong phrase for this. Our HDPE does not come back as IBC bottles; it becomes pipe. That is a cascade, not a loop, and calling it a loop would be flattering ourselves.
Why we own a granulator at all
Until 2018 we sold end-of-life containers to a reprocessor, which meant trusting somebody else's word about where the material ended up. That was not good enough to build a zero-landfill claim on, and we were making one.
Owning the line means our claim rests on our own weight tickets and the receiving processors' tickets, both of which we will send to any customer who asks. It cost more than outsourcing and it is the only reason the claim means anything.
What next year should look like
Smaller, ideally. Every percentage point we move from the granulation line to the rebottling bench is worth about 25 kg of CO₂e per container, and there is room: 171 of this year's retirements were bottle deformation, a large fraction of which was avoidable freeze and overfill damage on the customer's side.
That is a strange thing for a recycler to write. But we are not really a recycler. We are a reuse yard that happens to own a granulator for the eight percent of days when reuse loses.