We get asked about our offer prices roughly twice a week. Most of the time the question is "why are you offering me $X and the recycler down the street is offering me Y?" Here's the math we use.
The four inputs
Our per-tank offer is a function of four things:
- Tank size and condition (drives our resale value once washed)
- Distance to your facility (drives our freight cost to pick up)
- Volume at your site (drives consolidation efficiency)
- Time elapsed since the prior fill (drives wash chemistry needed)
How each input moves the offer
A clean 275-gallon HDPE tote with an intact valve, prior food-contact fill, drained within 90 days, sitting on a site where we can pick up 20+ tanks: we'll pay the top of our range, around $65 per tank.
The same tank with a missing valve drops the offer by roughly $15.
The same tank in a site where we can only pick up 4 totes drops the offer by another $10 because the per-tank freight cost goes up sharply.
The same tank where the prior fill is "we're not sure, but probably industrial soap" drops it another $5 because we need to run a more aggressive wash cycle.
Why our offers beat single-tote recyclers
A single-tote recycler is monetizing only the HDPE scrap value, which is roughly $0.18/lb. A 275-gallon tank yields roughly 144 lb of HDPE scrap, so the raw scrap math gives them roughly $26 per tank. After their handling and freight cost, they're often paying $5–$15 per tank or charging you to take them.
We're monetizing the tank as a tank. Our resale path on a reconditioned 275 is $89–$185 retail. After our wash labor, gasket replacement, freight, and yard overhead, we have roughly $35–$50 of margin per tank. That's why our buy-back offer can be substantially higher than a recycler's: we get more value out of the same input.
Why we sometimes can't beat the local market
Two cases:
- You're more than 4 hours from our yard and we can't consolidate the run. Freight eats our margin.
- The tank has a structural issue we can't undo. We're paying you for fab stock at that point, which is roughly $5–$15.
The fair-deal note
When the math doesn't work for us, we'll tell you and route you to a partner. We'd rather lose a single transaction than damage trust by lowballing.
Our offer is roughly 1.5x to 3x what a local recycler will offer for clean tanks. It's not magic — it's just that we're monetizing a tank-shaped object, not 144 lb of HDPE pellets.