What our HDPE actually sells for

The number

Prices have firmed through the first half, tracking virgin resin, which in turn tracks feedstock. The spread between natural and mixed colour has widened slightly, which rewards careful segregation at the granulator and is one reason we quarter bottles by hand rather than shredding whole containers.

What that means for one container

A 275 gallon container yields about 39 lb of bottle HDPE, 22 lb of composite pallet that goes into the same stream, and 66 lb of steel. At mid-range prices that is roughly $17 of plastic and $5 of steel, so about $22 of recoverable material value.

Against that, the same container reconditioned sells for $105 to $219. So granulating a serviceable container destroys somewhere between $83 and $197 of value in order to realise $22.

Who actually buys it

We name our destinations on request and the list is short and unglamorous.

• Corrugated drainage pipe extruders. The largest single outlet for natural container regrind in this region and a genuinely good end use — long service life, no further processing, replaces virgin material one for one.
• Plastic pallet moulders. Second largest. Tolerant of colour variation, which is where mixed-colour material goes.
• Geotextile and erosion-control backing. Lower value, high volume, undemanding on specification.
• Industrial container moulders for non-food, non-potable applications.
• An electric arc furnace on the Gulf Coast takes all of our baled steel. Galvanising is handled in the melt and zinc is recovered from baghouse dust.

What we cannot do is put container regrind back into new IBC bottles. Food-contact and structural requirements mean IBC bottles are moulded from virgin resin, so the loop is not closed at the material level for this product. It is closed at the object level, through reuse, which is a better loop anyway — and being clear about that distinction is more useful than pretending otherwise.

Why we publish this

Two reasons. First, customers rebottling their own fleets receive a resin credit against the job, and that credit is calculated from these prices — publishing them means the calculation is checkable rather than asserted.

Second, because the gap between $22 of material and $150 of container is the single most persuasive fact in this industry, and it is not widely known. People assume recycling is the environmentally responsible endpoint. It is the second-best endpoint, by a factor of about six on carbon and about seven on money, and the numbers say so plainly enough that nobody has to take our word for it.