Our intake graders make this call hundreds of times a week and it takes them about forty seconds per cage. Here is the triage, in the order they do it, so you can make the same call on your own fleet.
Step 1 · Push on it
Grab an upper corner and push laterally. A sound cage is rigid and returns. A cage with a failed weld or a bowed vertical will deflect and stay slightly out of square. That single push sorts most of the population.
Step 2 · Look at the feet
Feet and the lower frame take the forklift abuse and sit in whatever is on the floor, so they rust first. Surface rust is nothing. A foot you can deform with a thumb, or a foot plate that has detached from its tube, is a repair. A tube that is through-rusted where it meets the foot is the most common scrap verdict we issue.
Step 3 · Count the failed welds, by corner
Individual popped welds are routine and we repair them all day. More than three failures clustered in one corner means the frame geometry has already moved, and re-welding a moved frame gives you a cage that looks fixed and is not. That is a scrap.
Step 4 · Check for previous modification
Drilled holes, cut tubes, bolted-on brackets, straps welded by somebody’s cousin. Anything a previous owner did to the frame is a scrap verdict on our line — we cannot certify a frame whose load path has been altered by an unknown hand, and if it carried a UN marking, that marking is already void.
Step 5 · Separate the bottle verdict from the cage verdict
This is the step that most owners skip, and it is where the money is. The bottle and the cage are two independent assets with independent lifespans.
| Bottle | Cage | Verdict | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sound | Bent or bowed | Cage repair | Forty minutes on the press. Cheapest intervention we offer. |
| Yellowed, chalky or bulging | Sound | Rebottle | Steel has 15 years left; the bottle has none. |
| Unknown contents | Sound | Rebottle | Virgin interior, no guessing about residue. |
| Sound | Through-rusted or modified | Transplant | Move the good bottle into a refurbished cage. |
| Cracked or cut | Through-rusted | Retire | Bottle to regrind, steel to the mill. Still not landfill. |
| Any | Any, with a UN marking | Talk to us first | Repair voids the marking until licensed re-testing. |
What a repair costs versus what it saves
Straightening and re-footing a cage runs a small fraction of the cost of a replacement unit, and it keeps 48 kg of steel out of the re-melt stream — roughly 89 kg of CO₂e that would otherwise be spent making new steel. Rebottling costs more but still lands at about 42% of the embodied carbon of a new tote.
The purely financial case is strong. The environmental case is stronger. The case for buying new because it is simpler is the one worth resisting.
We quote cage repair and rebottling per unit on the rebottling page, and we will flag repairs we find during a toll wash rather than quietly washing around them.
