The call came on a Monday in November. A specialty coatings company that had operated outside of Aliquippa for three decades had gone through Chapter 7 faster than anybody expected. The trustee needed the leased warehouse empty inside of eleven business days or the lease penalty would eat into the creditors' pool. On the floor: 412 IBC totes in assorted grades, all empty, about a quarter still labeled with the original resin residues.
The offer
The trustee's team had gotten three quotes. One was from a scrap recycler willing to take the whole lot for scrap HDPE value minus haul — which actually would have cost the estate money once the haul fee cleared. Another was from a competitor of ours offering a cherry-pick rate per unit, which would have left the trustee with roughly 280 unsold units on a clock. The third was us.
We said we'd take every one of them at a flat per-unit rate, no picking, cash on pickup, eleven trucks over four days. The trustee signed the same afternoon. That put a modest but real check in the estate's hand. More importantly for us, it was 412 totes that didn't have to be individually negotiated, inspected, and photographed in a customer's yard. We did that work at home.
What they turned out to be
Of 412 totes received:
- 186 graded out as reconditionable (Grade B), with cage rash but sound bottles.
- 94 graded to Grade A after the full food-grade cycle.
- 77 had bottle cracks or delamination and went to HDPE granulation.
- 43 had compromised valves or gaskets; we rebuilt them.
- 12 were entirely unsalvageable (fuel soak, sun crack, or solvent delamination).
What it cost us to get there
Out-of-pocket, including trucking, wash-line chemicals, labor, granulation of the 77 failed units, and what we paid the estate, we were well into five figures before we sold the first unit. On the resale side: the top 94 Grade-A units moved inside six months at typical Grade-A prices; the 186 reconditioned Grade-Bs moved over the following fourteen months at typical Grade-B prices. The granulate, rebuilt valves, and cage scrap added a useful tail. Net margin before overhead: a healthy number that paid for itself in well under a year.
The audit took a month. The cleaning took six. The accounting took a year. The job paid for itself before the last tote left the yard.
What we learned
First, trustees like certainty more than money. The willingness to take the whole lot was worth more than the marginal upside on the cherry-picked offer. Second, the inside of a specialty coatings warehouse has a lot of surprises — we found a crate of unlabeled valves, two forklift batteries worth more than we paid for some totes, and a 1980s-era label printer that now sits in our break room as a conversation piece. Third, 412 is not the upper limit. Call us.