Company history
One shop was paying to throw totes away while a nursery two miles down the road was paying to buy them. Seventeen years later, that gap is still the whole business.
2009 → 2026
Company histories usually read like a straight line upward. Ours has a recall, a bad freight broker and an expensive lesson about door heights in it.
2009
Two brothers with a flatbed noticed that the plating shop down the road was paying to dispose of totes that a nursery two miles away was paying to buy. The arbitrage was embarrassing. The first month's revenue was $1,840.
2010
A food processor bought nine totes described as 'clean'. One had held a non-food surfactant. We took the whole load back, ate the freight, and wrote the first version of our last-contents disclosure rule that same week. It has never been relaxed.
2012
Moved into the Livonia yard we still occupy. Two bays, a gravel pad, and enough room to stage a truckload instead of three pallets.
2013
Going from a pressure washer to a staged rinse-caustic-rinse line changed what we could sell. Suddenly food-grade was a category we could stand behind, not a word we avoided.
2015
We realised we were scrapping perfectly good cages because of tired bottles. Sourcing new HDPE bottles to drop into refurbished cages cut our scrap rate by a third overnight.
2016
A customer asked, reasonably, 'how do you know this cage is on its third life and not its ninth?' We did not have a good answer. Six weeks later every cage leaving the yard was stencilled with an ID and had a file behind it.
2018
Brokered freight was the weakest link: late pickups, damaged cages, nobody to call. Buying flatbeds was expensive and immediately correct. Backhauling empties on outbound lanes also quietly cut our freight emissions.
2019
Signed a standing agreement with a regional reprocessor so that bottles we genuinely cannot save become clean HDPE regrind rather than mixed waste. Landfill tonnage dropped by 71% in one year.
2021
Customers kept asking us to cut, fit and plumb totes for rain harvesting, aquaponics and livestock watering. We stopped improvising and built a dedicated bay with proper fittings inventory.
2023
For customers who ship the same route every month, we started managing the cages as a pool: we own them, wash them, track them and return them. Their capex problem became our logistics problem, which is the one we are good at.
2024
Filtration and recirculation on the wash line cut fresh-water draw per tote by roughly 60%. Treated discharge is tested before it leaves the property.
2026
Five trucks, a 94% reuse rate on intake, a growing upcycled-products line and a published zero-landfill target for 2028. Still on Brookfield Street. Still writing everything down.
“Every year the industry invents a new word for selling the same plastic twice. We just kept the receipts.”
There is no founder mythology here. The company grew because reuse is structurally cheaper and structurally cleaner than manufacturing, and because we were willing to do the boring documentation work that makes reused equipment safe to buy.
Send one form. We answer with real numbers — grade, quantity, freight, lead time.
