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Our story

We started because watching good totes get crushed felt criminal.

What began as a side hustle reselling food-grade totes out of a Grand Rapids garage in 2015 grew into the busiest reconditioning yard in West Michigan.

People-first

Want the long version? Email us.

Or skip the back story and tell us what you need. Either way, a person answers within one business day.

IBC Tanks Cleveland isn't actually in Cleveland — at least, not the one in Ohio. The original owner, who'd driven a tanker truck out of Cleveland Avenue in Grand Rapids for two decades, named the company after the street his first warehouse sat on. The name stuck because the work didn't care where it happened.

The first year we moved 47 totes. The next year, 1,200. By 2019 the yard had outgrown its garage and we leased the lot at 902 Scribner — across the river from the foundries, close enough to truck routes that flatbeds could pull off the interstate and unload without fighting traffic.

What we believe

An IBC tote weighs about 110 pounds empty. Most are made of high-density polyethylene, the kind of plastic that takes 400+ years to break down in the ground. A new one costs anywhere from $180 to $260. A reconditioned one, functionally identical, costs $50–$110 and was already sitting in a yard somewhere waiting to die. That gap is the entire business.

We don't think the gap closes by writing essays about sustainability. It closes by making the used tote the easier, cheaper, faster purchase. When a farm manager in Allegan County calls his usual ag supplier for two totes of fertilizer mix and finds out we've got eight food-grade washed ones an hour away — used won. That's the whole game.

What we don't do

We don't take phone calls. We're a four-person shop and answering the phone meant nobody was washing totes. Email gets answered within a business day — usually by lunch.
We don't do drop-shipping or third-party sales. Every container we sell has been in our yard, on our wash bay, with our DOT/UN paperwork.
We don't pretend the recycling story is clean. Plastic recycling is hard. We're honest about which totes ended up where — see our Sustainability Promise.
We don't ship outside the Great Lakes region by default. The carbon math on long-haul empties doesn't pencil out. (Exceptions on full truckloads.)

The yard, in numbers

2.4 acres at 902 Scribner Ave NW, with a covered wash bay and a fenced staging area for food-grade stock.
Four full-time staff, two part-time washers, one office cat (Maple).
~14,000 totes pass through the yard each year.
Roughly 78% of incoming totes are washed and resold; ~14% repurposed; ~8% recycled to polymer.

What's next

We're piloting a deposit-return program for breweries and cidermakers in 2026. Drop a tote off, get a credit slip, pick up a freshly washed one for the next batch. If you run a fermentation operation and want in early, drop us a line.

Our Mission

The eight words we judge every decision against.

Sustainability Promise

What we measure, what we don't, and where the math gets honest.

Team & Facility

The four people, two part-timers, and one cat keeping the yard running.

The yard, on the record

The long-form file.

We started in 2022 with one borrowed forklift and 18 totes. Three years in, we run a two-bay wash facility, a small fleet of flatbeds, and a yard that processes ~2,000 bottles per quarter. Here's the long version.

2022

Year founded

14,000+

Bottles handled since opening

11 staff

Across yard, wash bay, fab, and office

75 mi

Average pickup radius — the moat is local

Deep dive

The detail behind the surface.

§ 01

The seven lessons we'd give to anyone starting one of these

1. Pickup geometry is the moat. Brokers can list inventory online without owning it. What they can't do is show up to a customer's yard with a flatbed and load 30 totes in two hours. That's the durable advantage.

2. The wash bay eats more capex than you'd think. Our first wash bay was a pressure washer and a tarp. The second was designed properly with a conveyor approach and automated rinse. The second paid for itself in 11 months on labor savings alone, before counting water recycling.

3. Per-tote tagging matters more than it should. 90 seconds per bottle to record manufacture year, grade, previous contents, wash protocol, technician, and date. The internal QC value and the customer-audit value both surprised us.

4. Local relationships > online reach. The website matters; it's how people find us. The relationships that sustain the business are within 100 miles. Showing up matters.

5. Sustainability is a real product feature, not marketing. A non-trivial fraction of customers choose us over cheaper brokers because the carbon math is documented. Procurement teams need to source recycled inputs and document scope-3 emissions; documented circular suppliers are genuinely valuable to them.

6. The food-grade market is bigger than expected. We assumed 15–20% of revenue; it's closer to 40%. The Midwest small-batch food economy has been growing for a decade.

7. Email beats phone for our operation. Phone calls are sequential; email is parallel. Two people emailing simultaneously both get answers inside four hours; one phone call blocks the queue. We get fewer complaints about responsiveness than peers who do answer phones. YMMV.

§ 02

The bottles tell stories

This is the sentimental part. Every bottle has a history — what it carried, where it traveled, who handled it. We have bottles from a brewery that closed during the pandemic. From a fruit processor that started as a roadside stand in the 1980s. From a fertilizer co-op that's been operating since the Eisenhower administration. Each bottle is going to do another decade of work after we're done with it. That's a satisfying thing to be part of.