I keep a running tally on the wall of our intake bay of how many totes we have processed and how many we have rejected. As of last Tuesday the count was 14,442 reborn and 1,289 rejected. That works out to roughly nine percent of incoming totes that never make it back out as a sellable product.
A new bay tech once asked me if the company was trying to lower the reject rate. The honest answer is no — we are trying to keep it where it is, and the day we feel pressure to push it down is the day we have a quality problem. Here is the math behind that opinion.
What we reject and why
The biggest single category is bottles with structural cracks or crazing at high-stress points. These are usually invisible until you fill the tote with water for the leak test, at which point a hairline opens up and we have a small flood. About 4% of incoming totes fail at this stage.
The second category is cages that have been bent and re-straightened by a previous owner. The galvanized steel work-hardens when bent, so a cage that has been bent back into shape is more brittle at the bend point and more likely to fail again the next time the tote gets dropped or stacked. We will not pretend these are the same as a fresh cage. About 2.5% of intake gets rejected for cage damage.
The third category is pallets that fail the bottom-deck inspection — soaked, rotted, fungus-eaten, or with cracked stringers. We can replace pallets, but the labor cost makes it unprofitable on Grade C totes, so we route those to recycling. About 1.5% of intake.
The remainder is a mix of unknown prior contents that we cannot document, valve seats that have failed and cannot be cleanly replaced, and the occasional tote that comes in carrying a residual smell strong enough that we will not put our name on it. About 1% combined.
What happens to a rejected tote
Every rejected tote is end-of-life recycled. The HDPE bottle is granulated by our local plastics partner. The galvanized cage is stripped, sorted by gauge, and baled for the steel mill. The pallet is either refurbished if reusable or ground into mulch for the local landscape supply. We issue a Certificate of Recycling for every rejected tote and we count it in our annual sustainability report. Zero pounds of material from a rejected tote leave our facility headed for landfill.
Why we are not trying to lower the reject rate
Every percentage point of reject rate represents a tote that we did not lie about. If we lowered our standards by even half a percentage point, we would be putting compromised totes back into the supply chain, and the cost of that would land on our customers — sometimes catastrophically, in the form of a leaking tote on a fill line at three in the morning. We would rather sell fewer totes and have every one of them pass inspection cleanly than sell more and apologize for them later.
The 9% reject rate is what an honest reconditioner looks like. Anyone advertising 1% or 2% is either better than us at sourcing (possible) or is shipping things they should not (more likely). I would rather be the company that rejects too much than the company that ships a borderline tote.
— Marisol García, IBC Denver