Wednesday the 13th of November started at 4:47 am when I parked at the yard gate. The temperature was 27°F, which in McKees Rocks means the downspouts are making ice cones and the wash line needs the insulating heat traced before anybody shows up to run it. What follows is the actual notebook from that day. I kept it because I knew I'd want the details later.
Intake: 41 totes, four generators
- 7:10 am — Clayton Trucking rolls in with 18 totes from a soap-manufacturing customer in East Liberty. Mixed Grade A and B. Cage rash on four.
- 8:45 am — Small local farmer drops off 3 totes he rented from a neighbor. All three had held livestock water, no regulatory paperwork needed. We take them at a token per-unit rate.
- 10:20 am — Big inbound from a solvent distributor in Monroeville. 14 totes, all labeled as prior xylene use. We reject 9 outright (solvent soak beyond remediation) and take the 5 that had seen less than a month of contact. They'll go to HDPE granulation.
- 2:15 pm — A courier delivers 6 reconditioned cages from our outside galvanizer who does rust-repair for us once a quarter. Not totes per se, but part of the day's intake.
Outbound: 23 totes, six customers
Morning shipments went out on two trucks. Afternoon shipments were customer pickup. Highlights:
- 8 Grade-A food-grade totes to a maple syrup operation in Somerset County.
- 4 reconditioned Grade-B totes to a water-hauler in Butler.
- Two 330-gallon units bound for a DEF station build (see earlier post) at a trucking yard in Canonsburg.
- 9 scattered singles on will-call, one of which the customer forgot to claim by close.
The inspector visit
At 10:55 am a white Chevy Blazer with PennDOT plates rolled up and a mid-forties woman walked into the office holding a clipboard. She introduced herself as Ms. Torres and asked for the facility's waste manifest records going back six months. Unannounced inspection. Not unheard of, but not frequent.
We have a binder for that exact request. Two binders, actually — one paper, one digital on a laptop that lives in the office because we don't entirely trust cloud backups. Twelve minutes into her review she asked about a specific intake from September that had three totes transferred from a now-closed chemical distributor in Baldwin. I pulled the original manifest, the wash-line record, the ledger entry, and the disposition paperwork. She photographed all four documents and left ten minutes later without comment.
An unannounced inspector is a paperwork test, not a physical inspection. We passed because of the filing habit, not because the yard looks a particular way.
End of day
4:38 pm — gate locked. Ledger updated. Wash line purged for overnight freeze. Heater checks on the reconditioning bay. The one unclaimed tote sits under a tarp for tomorrow. The coffee van, which I haven't mentioned, came by twice, which is once more than I would have guessed. In the yard, no day is ever exactly the same and no day is ever exactly new.