Nine things that arrive in a decommissioning load

I still walk most decommissioning surveys personally, partly because I enjoy them and partly because the phone description and the yard are never the same thing. Somebody says "about two hundred totes, most of them fine". It is never about two hundred and they are never most of them fine. Here is what is actually out there.

One: the good stack nobody mentioned

Almost every yard has a run of units in genuinely good condition, usually nearest the building, usually the most recent arrivals. They were kept because somebody intended to reuse them and then the project changed. These grade out as rinsed or reconditionable and they carry the economics of the whole job.

You can date a yard by walking outward from the building. The newest units are closest, the oldest are against the fence, and the gradient is remarkably consistent because nobody ever reorganises a pile they are not using.

Two: the weathered row along the fence

Three winters of sun on translucent HDPE produces crazing: a fine crackled surface that has not yet cracked through. These are the single largest category in most yards and they are the most misjudged — the owner assumes they are scrap, and in fact the cage underneath is usually excellent. They are prime rebottling stock.

The giveaway is that the cage looks better than the bottle, which is the reverse of what people expect. Galvanised steel weathers gracefully; translucent polyethylene does not.

Three: the ones with something still in them

There are always a few. A heel of an inch or two we can manage with a manifest. Units holding usable quantities of product are a different job entirely — that is waste disposal, which we are not permitted to be. We mark those, leave them, and tell the customer to get a licensed firm for that portion.

Four: the unlabelled unknowns

Labels fade, plates corrode, and the person who would have known retired in 2019. If we cannot establish prior contents from the label, the plate, the paperwork or somebody's memory, the unit goes to material recovery rather than the sales floor. We will not guess, and we will not sell a container with an invented history.

This is almost always the 1% that ends up at permitted disposal, and it is the one line on the certificate that customers find reassuring rather than alarming — because its presence is what makes the other lines credible.

Worth saying: the number is low because most sites have more institutional memory than they think. On the survey we talk to whoever has been there longest, and that conversation resolves more unknowns than any amount of label archaeology.

Five: the bare cages

Somebody, at some point, cut the bottles out of a dozen units for a project. The cages got stacked and forgotten. These are straightforward value: straightened, shot-blasted and sold as bare cages or fed straight into rebottling.

Six: the fabrication leftovers

Cut-down tubs, units with hatches sawn into them, one memorable example with a window siliconed into the side. These have no container value and are not candidates for anything except recovery, but the steel and the plastic still weigh what they weigh.

I have a quiet fondness for these. Somebody solved a problem with what they had, which is the whole philosophy of this business expressed through an angle grinder.

Seven: pallets, loose and various

Steel, plastic, composite and a lot of hardwood in varying states. Sound bases go straight back into the reuse pool, which is a genuinely good outcome because a base swap during reconditioning costs almost nothing in labour and transforms a tote destined for a food plant.

Eight: the thing that is not a tote

Every job has one. A 500-gallon vertical poly tank. A stainless bin nobody could place. Two drums of something. A plastic silo. We quote what we can take and tell the customer plainly what we cannot, because the alternative is a surprise on loading day.

Nine: the deadline

The least physical item in the load and frequently the one that governs everything. Lease exits, plant closures and fire-code orders all come with a date, and the date usually matters more to the customer than the price does.

We stage large yards over one to three weeks so we are not blocking an operating site, but if the date is hard we will work to it. Tell us the date on the first email — it changes how we scope the job more than the unit count does.

What a survey actually involves

For anyone considering this, the survey is not an inspection of every unit. On a 400-unit yard it is about ninety minutes and it looks like this.

1. Walk the perimeter and photograph the pile from four corners, to establish scale and layout.
2. Sample twenty units across the condition gradient — nearest the building, middle, against the fence.
3. Open and smell six of them. Odour tells you more about resale value than appearance does.
4. Read every plate we can find, looking for a dominant manufacturer and a date range.
5. Talk to whoever has worked there longest about what the site has filled over the years.
6. Identify the units that are not drained, and the ones with no identifiable history.

From that we produce a disposition count by stream and a firm number. The survey itself is free, and we would rather do it than quote blind — a blind quote on a decommissioning job is always wrong in one direction or the other.

Why it usually pays

Because 73% of that table still has container value. The resaleable, reconditionable and rebottlable portions fund the labour and haulage on the portion that does not. A general scrap contractor shreds all of it mixed and pays you shred price for the lot, which is why our quote so often beats a disposal quote.

The exception is a yard that is genuinely almost all weathered scrap — it happens, usually on sites that stopped operating years before anyone dealt with the pile. Those jobs have a net cost and we say so after the survey, before anyone commits.

Send a rough count, a postal code and two photographs from opposite corners of the pile. We can usually tell you within a day whether clearing your yard pays you, costs you, or comes out level. Details on the decommissioning page.