I run the fabrication corner at the yard. Most of my day is custom builds for repeat customers — rain catchers, growing beds, mash tuns. But occasionally a tote arrives that I can't bring myself to send to the recycler, and the choices I make about those are how the corner ended up existing in the first place.
The first one
About three years ago a tote came in from a brewery in Holland, Michigan, with a hairline crack in the bottle. It was a 330. Cosmetically it was beautiful — clean cage, good pallet, valve intact. It just had a slow leak we couldn't safely fix.
I asked Mike if I could keep it. He said yes if I promised to do something interesting with it.
I cut the top off, drilled a brass spigot into the bottom, screened the inlet, and turned it into a rain catcher for my own backyard. My neighbor saw it, asked if I could build one for her. I built her one for $80 in parts. Her neighbor asked. By the end of that summer I'd built nine of them.
The fabrication corner
That's when Mike and Andre started asking customers if they wanted custom builds. We had about 4 inquiries the first month. Now we average 12 to 18 per month.
The mix has gotten weirder over time. Rain catchers are still our number-one build, but we've done:
- Mash tuns for a startup brewery in Ann Arbor (eleven of them, three cycles of iteration)
- Aquaponic sumps for two indoor farms
- A cold-plunge tank for a wellness studio downtown
- A water reservoir for a BMX track water jump (this one ran six totes and we shipped them in pieces)
- Two emergency potable-water holds for churches in Detroit
- A continuous-brew kombucha rig for a café in Grand Rapids
- Compost-tea brewers for three commercial gardens
- An above-ground koi pond filter sump
What I've learned
The frame of an IBC tote is shockingly versatile. Most failures we see at intake are bottle-side — the steel cage is almost always fine, the pallet runners are almost always fine. If I can cut off the dead bottle and weld a new fitting in, I can almost always make something useful.
The thing that surprised me is how often the customer wants the tote to *look* like a tote. They want the cage exposed, the original valve in place, the pallet visible. There's a kind of honest industrial aesthetic to a tote-frame rain catcher in a backyard that you can't fake.
The most sustainable thing I do at the yard is convert a broken tote into a thing somebody wants. I'm not sure that's in any of the environmental reports we write, but it should be.