PittsburghTotes · RecyclingQuote
02.3About · Promise
Receipts, not greenwashing

Every claim we make
gets a number.

Nine measurable commitments. A public quarterly audit. A ledger that anyone can look at. If one of these numbers slips, we'll tell you before you ask.

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0
Totes rescued (lifetime)
0%
Percent reused, not shredded
0 t
Metric tons of CO₂ avoided
0
Totes sent to landfill, ever

The nine commitments

  1. No incoming tote enters a landfill. Everything is reused, reconditioned, or reclaimed.
  2. We post a quarterly third-party audit covering reuse rate, reclamation rate, fuel consumption, and waste streams.
  3. Every totes gets a unique ID and a ledger entry before it leaves the yard.
  4. Food-grade (Grade A) reconditioning follows FDA 21 CFR 177.1520 and is UN31A re-certified on every rebottled unit.
  5. We refuse totes we can't positively identify — residue, label, origin. Unknown in, known out.
  6. HDPE granulation happens on site; pellets are sold only to U.S. re-bottlers with full origin-of-material disclosure.
  7. Cages and valves move into local metal and elastomer streams. Labels are archived, not tossed.
  8. Our freight runs biodiesel blends where available and consolidates loads to avoid solo trips.
  9. Our yard is powered 100% by a regional clean-energy cooperative (documented in each quarterly report).
Latest audit
Q1 — a clean quarter
Reuse rate
93.2%
Reclamation rate (remainder)
6.8%
Landfill rate
0.0%
Avg fuel/load
3.4 mpg (biodiesel B20)
Staff injuries
0
Customer complaints
1 (resolved in 4 days)
Open the tank ledger →

Eight quarters, tallied.

Our auditor, an environmental-compliance firm based in Monroeville, PA, measures six metrics every ninety days and publishes the result before we do. Here's the rolling two-year ledger.

QuarterTanks processedReuse %Reclaim %Landfill %CO₂ avoided (t)Fuel / load
2024 Q13,10491.8%8.2%0.0%229.73.1 mpg
2024 Q23,48292.4%7.6%0.0%257.73.2 mpg
2024 Q33,61193.0%7.0%0.0%267.23.3 mpg
2024 Q43,18992.7%7.3%0.0%236.03.3 mpg
2025 Q13,34093.1%6.9%0.0%247.23.4 mpg
2025 Q23,50293.5%6.5%0.0%259.23.4 mpg
2025 Q33,64793.3%6.7%0.0%269.93.4 mpg
2026 Q13,29893.2%6.8%0.0%244.03.4 mpg

Auditor: Three Rivers Environmental Review LLC. The full PDF of each quarterly report — including methodology, raw logs, and scope notes — is available on request by email and is also filed with the PA DEP Office of Waste Management.

Scope, honestly drawn.

A sustainability number is only useful if you know what it counts. Here's the scope boundary we publish with every quarterly audit, so readers can compare us to other yards on equal terms.

Scope 1

Direct emissions: our two box trucks, one forklift, wash-bay boiler, and granulator motor. Measured from fuel receipts and utility meters, not modeled.

Scope 2

Grid electricity: covered by our regional clean-energy cooperative contract (100% renewable attribution certificates). We disclose both the CEC total and the equivalent grid-mix figure.

Scope 3 (partial)

Upstream freight for tanks we purchase, and downstream freight for pellets we sell. We don't report customer-side logistics once a tank leaves our yard — that's a number the customer owns.

What we exclude

Employee commutes, office paper, and the occasional break-room pizza delivery. These are material at the individual level, immaterial at the yard level.

Downstream partners, named.

A chain of custody is only real if you can point to the next link. Here are the facilities that take our reclaimed streams today.

HDPE pellet buyers

Two mid-size re-bottlers in Ohio and Indiana. Each purchases roughly half our annual pellet output (~84 tons combined) and issues a certificate of post-industrial origin on every shipment.

Steel cage scrap

Etna Metals and a backup yard in Sharpsburg. Cages are straightened and sorted as Grade 2 HMS (heavy melting scrap). Steel is remelted domestically, per our supplier contract.

Elastomer reclaim

A gasket-and-seal recycler in Akron, OH takes our EPDM, Viton, and PTFE components. The stream is small — roughly 340 lb per quarter — but it moves every month.

Wood pallet stream

Local pallet re-processor in Carnegie, PA takes our HT-treated wood pallets for either refurbishment or mulch. Zero go to landfill.

Container-board and label paper

Baled on-site and picked up weekly by a Pittsburgh-based paper mill. Roughly 1.2 tons per month.

Wash-bay effluent

Sanitary-sewer connection to ALCOSAN's McKees Rocks trunk, permitted and metered. We file monthly discharge reports, available on request.

When a number slips.

Our audit will drift at some point. A freight provider will change fuel blend. A buyer will default. A run of tanks will come in with more residue than our wash bay can stretch to handle. When that happens, we publish a correction note within fourteen days, describe the root cause, and list the remediation.

We've done it twice so far — once in 2022 (a pellet-buyer quality complaint that knocked our reclaim certification into a re-submission loop), and once in early 2024 (a snowstorm that forced a rush of single-unit freight at poor consolidation). Both correction notes are archived with the quarterly reports.

Correction-note template
  1. Metric affected and the magnitude of the drift (with prior-quarter comparison).
  2. Root cause, identified by our foreman, not paraphrased.
  3. Remediation already in place on the day of publication.
  4. What we're changing so it doesn't recur.
  5. Target recovery quarter, stated as a commitment.
  6. Sign-off by Dale and the auditor of record.
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