A yard, a mission, a lot of plastic that didn't get burned.
IBC Illinois exists because the cheapest tote on the planet is the one that already exists. Everything else we do follows from that single sentence.
Start the conversation
Same form, every page. Tell us once — we route it to whoever's closest to your tote.
Our Story
From a one-truck pickup route in 2007 to a four-acre yard on Scribner.
Read →02 · WhySustainability Pledge
The five commitments we make about every tote that passes through our yard.
Read →03 · Spec sheetWhy Used IBCs
The five-pound math of cost, carbon, and capability for reused vs new.
Read →04 · PeopleTeam & Yard
Who actually inspects, washes, and tags the tank you'll receive.
Read →05 · ToolEco-Impact Calculator
Plug in a quantity. Get the CO₂, water, and HDPE you'd otherwise burn.
Calculate →Every tote has at least one more job left in it.
Roughly 12 million IBC totes are produced globally each year. The average tote leaves its first use after 18 months. Around 40% of those are landfilled or incinerated instead of being refilled or reconditioned.
The reason isn't engineering. The reason is logistics: a clean tote in the wrong city isn't useful. We chose to be the logistics layer that fixes that.
That's it. That's the whole company.
What IBC Illinois looks like, by the metrics that matter.
A side hustle that turned into a career.
Most reconditioning companies started inside a packaging conglomerate. We started in a brewery loading dock. That origin matters because it shapes how we think about the work.
In 2007, Mike Tarsis was running industrial logistics for a regional packaging distributor in Lansing. Andre Plowman was a homebrewer who'd taken a part-time job at the brewery Mike supplied hops to. They got to talking one afternoon about the dozen empty IBC totes piling up behind the brewery — totes the brewery couldn't sell, couldn't recycle locally, and didn't have time to clean.
That conversation ended with a pickup truck and a quarter-acre rented lot in Battle Creek. Within eighteen months it was a side business. Within four years it was the only thing either of them did. By 2015 we'd outgrown Battle Creek and moved to the four-acre yard at 902 Scribner Ave NW. We've been there ever since.
What started as a single-truck pickup route is now a Midwest reconditioning operation that ships into eight states and has rescued roughly a quarter-million tanks from the waste stream. Same two co-founders. Same yard. Same answer to every email within one business day.
Four things we won't compromise on.
Document everything
Every tank carries a chain-of-custody tag, every wash batch has a lot number, every customer interaction is on the record. Documentation is how trust scales beyond the people who knew you in 2007.
Recondition before recycle
A washed tote keeps 96% of its embodied carbon. A recycled one keeps 41%. We go to recycling only when reuse is unsafe — never as a convenience.
Pay above market
We pay our wash bay techs roughly 25% above regional median for comparable industrial work. The math says it's cheaper to retain than to replace, and the quality of work shows it.
Don't grow past the team
We could be twice this size. We're not, because the culture works at this scale and we don't know if it would work at twice this scale. Slow growth is a real choice.
“Some businesses are built to scale. Ours is built to last. Those aren't the same goal.”
— Andre Plowman, co-founder
Why work with us specifically.
We're not the cheapest reconditioner you can find. We're not the closest one either, depending on where you sit. What we are is the one with the cleanest paperwork, the most predictable lead times, the most honest grading, and the most consolidated freight network in the upper Midwest. Those four things compound over a buying relationship.
If your buying volume is high enough that lead time and paperwork matter, we're almost always the right pick. If your volume is small and you don't care about chain-of-custody documentation, you can probably do better on price with a local single-tote operator. We're comfortable telling you that.
The fastest way to find out which side you're on is to send us a request through the form on any page. We'll quote you within a business day. If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you and point you to who is.