Knowledge · The Yard Journal
The Yard
Journal.
Short answer
- 34 posts across 5 years
- Written by five people who do the work, not a content team
- Every figure traces to our own records or a stated source
- Includes the decisions we got wrong
Question we have not covered?
Everything we have published
The archive
Filter by topic or year. Every post is in the page whether or not the filters are used, so you can also just read down the list.
2026
5 posts- The business
Seventeen years in, what we got wrong
Five decisions I would make differently, including the one that cost us four years and the one I still cannot decide about.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 5 min read
- Grades & specs
What a crushed cage tells you about the bottle inside
Counterintuitively, the worse the cage looks, the better the odds on the bottle. We pulled three years of intake records to check.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 4 min read
- How-to
Cut-down troughs: the fabrication job we do most
Half our fabrication bay output is one job. Here is how we do it, what it costs, and the two mistakes that make a home-made version dangerous.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 4 min read
- Freight
Tote pooling maths for a blender shipping to forty customers
A worked example with real numbers: when a managed pool beats owning containers, and the two conditions under which it does not.
Dale Ferreira · Logistics lead · 4 min read
- The business
Why we answer in one business day and not instantly
We could return a price in four seconds. It would be wrong often enough to be worse than useless, and here is the specific arithmetic of why.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 4 min read
2025
9 posts- The business
Our grading floor is deliberately boring
Six labelled bays, one decision per unit, no judgement calls allowed at the end of a shift. Interesting processes produce inconsistent grades.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 4 min read
- Market
The case against buying new, written for a procurement team
Not an environmental argument. A specification argument, with the three clauses that genuinely require new containers and the four that do not.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 4 min read
- How-to
Rain barrels, food grade, and the conversation we have every spring
Somebody wants one tote for a vegetable garden. The honest answer takes four questions and occasionally costs us the sale.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 4 min read
- How-to
Specific gravity is the number nobody sends us
Almost every enquiry gives a volume. Almost none gives a density. It is the difference between a container that works and a load that gets turned away at a scale.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 3 min read
- Grades & specs
What changed when we got our own reconditioner code
Before 2023 a UN re-marking took three weeks in somebody else's queue. Now it takes four days in ours. The interesting part is what the delay was actually costing.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 3 min read
- Grades & specs
Reading prior-contents affidavits like an auditor
Most affidavits are honest and useless. The difference between a document that protects you and one that does not comes down to four specific fields.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 4 min read
- How-to
Camlocks, buttress threads and the fitting that ruins an outlet
An IBC outlet is moulded into the bottle. Strip it and the whole bottle is scrap — which makes a four-dollar adapter the cheapest insurance in the catalogue.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 4 min read
- Sustainability
Why we publish the 88 kg we spend
Most avoided-emissions figures count only the avoided side. Ours subtracts what reconditioning actually costs us, and that subtraction is the reason the number is usable.
Theo Marsh · Materials & reporting · 3 min read
- Field notes
The tote that came back eleven times
Asset 4417 cycled through our wash line eleven times across four years and three owners. Here is its complete file, and what it says about the 7.4 average.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 4 min read
2024
8 posts- The business
A short history of the 48 × 40 footprint
Every composite IBC in North America is built to a grocery-industry pallet standard from 1968. That accident governs trailer loading, rack design and half our freight arithmetic.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 4 min read
- Sustainability
What regrind buyers actually pay for
Colour and melt index, in that order. Sorting to that granularity cut our granulator payback from 4.5 years to 3.2, and nobody modelled it in advance.
Theo Marsh · Materials & reporting · 4 min read
- Freight
The three questions that prevent a reconsignment
A truck that arrives and cannot unload costs several hundred dollars plus a redelivery. In four years, every single one traced back to the same three facts.
Dale Ferreira · Logistics lead · 4 min read
- Freight
A 48-inch load centre will lie to your forklift
Your 5,000 lb truck is rated at a 24-inch load centre. A filled tote puts the centre of mass twice that far out, and the derating is not subtle.
Dale Ferreira · Logistics lead · 4 min read
- Sustainability
How we count a tote that never comes back
Attrition in a returnable pool runs 8% to 14% a year. Pretending otherwise produces sustainability numbers that quietly inflate.
Theo Marsh · Materials & reporting · 5 min read
- Market
The economics of a ten-unit order
Ten units is the most common order size we quote and the most frequently mispriced by the buyer. The lever is not the grade.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 4 min read
- Market
Why food-grade supply collapses every August
It is not demand. Documented food-contact stock depends on affidavits, and affidavits depend on somebody at a beverage plant having time to sign one.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 4 min read
- Field notes
Freezing is still the biggest killer of totes north of us
Our Midwest partner yards scrap four times more bottles than we do, and almost all of the difference is one split at one corner.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 5 min read
2023
8 posts- The business
Our first failed partner yard audit
We decertified a yard in 2021. They were not cutting corners on purpose — they were running one wash chemistry, and that is enough.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 5 min read
- Grades & specs
What the 2.5-year retest actually catches
Three years of test bay records, sorted by failure mode. The periodic leakproofness test is not a formality, and what it finds is not what most people expect.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 4 min read
- Field notes
Hurricane season changes how we stack
An empty tote is a 132 lb sail. Here is what fifteen Atlantic seasons taught a yard eleven miles from the Georgia coast.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 5 min read
- Freight
Shrink wrap is a receiving-dock tax
Eleven pounds of film per trailer, cut off and binned the same afternoon. We switched to reusable corner board in 2019 and it cost us more. Here is the accounting.
Dale Ferreira · Logistics lead · 5 min read
- The business
Why we turned down a 2,000-unit order
The specification was food grade, the quantity was real and the buyer was serious. We said no, and I would make the same call again.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 5 min read
- Freight
The hidden cost of a wooden pallet in a return loop
A hardwood base costs 40% less to buy and 3.6 times more per turn. We tracked bases through our own pool for two years to work out why.
Dale Ferreira · Logistics lead · 5 min read
- Field notes
Nine things that arrive in a decommissioning load
A yard clear-out is never a clean count of one thing. Here is the actual mix from our last eleven jobs, including the units nobody warned us about.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 6 min read
- Market
Resin prices and used tote prices are not the same curve
Everyone assumes used container prices track polymer markets. They track freight, supply of empties and grade scarcity instead — and the lag runs in an unexpected direction.
Nina Caldwell · Trading desk · 5 min read
2022
4 posts- How-to
Reading a cage weld: a field guide to the joint that kills totes
The upright-to-rail joint decides whether a cage is rebottled or baled. Here is what we look at, in what order, and why a bowed upright is fine but a kinked one is not.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 6 min read
- Sustainability
The day we bought a granulator and stopped pretending
Material recovery is marginal on a spreadsheet. We bought the equipment anyway, because outsourcing it meant we could not honestly say where the plastic went.
Theo Marsh · Materials & reporting · 5 min read
- Grades & specs
Why your tote still smells after we washed it
Permeation is not a cleaning failure. It is a material property of HDPE, and understanding it explains most of the grading rules in this industry.
Priya Raghunathan · Head of reconditioning · 6 min read
- The business
The disposal invoice that started a company
A Garden City blender was paying $19,400 a year to bury containers that were not broken. Here is the arithmetic that turned that line item into a business.
Marcus Vreeland · Founder · 7 min read
Who writes this
Five people, five desks, no content team
Everybody here writes about the part of the yard they actually run. It is why the posts are specific and why they occasionally disagree with each other.
Founder
Marcus Vreeland
Started the company in 2009 with a 1998 flatbed and a hand-written ledger. Still reads every decommissioning survey.
8 posts
Head of reconditioning
Priya Raghunathan
Runs the three wash lines and the test bay. Has rejected more totes than anyone else in the building, which is the point of the job.
9 posts
Logistics lead
Dale Ferreira
Books every load that leaves the yard. Asks "is there a dock?" in his sleep.
5 posts
Trading desk
Nina Caldwell
Prices grades and landed freight. Measured on used-first sourcing and repeat business, not on margin per unit.
8 posts
Materials & reporting
Theo Marsh
Owns the granulator, the baler and the diversion certificates. Writes the carbon methodology and defends the coefficients.
4 posts
What comes up most
- food grade4
- freight3
- grading3
- operations3
- pooling3
- safety3
- affidavits2
- audit2
- cages2
- compliance2
- economics2
- history2
- inspection2
- logistics2
- markets2
- methodology2
- pallets2
- pricing2
If a subject here is relevant to a decision you are making and the post does not quite answer it, write to us. A good share of this archive exists because somebody asked the same question three times and we decided to write it down properly.
Reference, not reading
The journal is for thinking out loud. If you need the specification rather than the argument, the reference pages are structured for lookup instead.
Next move
Disagree with something here?
Tell us. We have corrected our carbon methodology four times and two of those came from readers. Write to hello@reibcmarket.com.