Rebottled IBC totes
New bottle in a reclaimed cage — A-grade interior, B-grade price.
Product 01 · The workhorse
Reconditioned
IBC totes
A reconditioned tote is a used tote that has been emptied, washed, rebuilt and pressure-checked until it will do a second decade of work. It is the cheapest honest way to move a thousand litres of anything, and it is the single largest thing our yard does.
Order desk
Price reconditioned IBC totes
Quantity and delivery ZIP are what move the price. Tell us those and the grade you think you need, and we will confirm or talk you down to something cheaper.
The short answer
Reconditioned IBC totes are used 275 or 330 gallon containers that we strip, wash inside and out, fit with a rebuilt or new valve and cap, leak-test at pressure, and re-grade before resale. Expect $105–$219 depending on grade, size and volume. Every unit keeps its original UN-marked cage and bottle, so the container you receive is the container that already survived a first life.
- 275 gal (1,000 L) and 330 gal (1,250 L), both on the same 48" × 40" footprint
- Graded A / B / C on cage, bottle clarity, prior contents and valve condition
- Triple-rinsed as standard; caustic CIP and steam available on request
- Every tote leak-tested and photographed with its lot number before loading
What we actually do to a tote before we call it reconditioned
"Reconditioned" is an unregulated word in this trade, which is exactly why we publish our sequence. A tote that arrives on our yard at 7am on a Tuesday goes through eight stations before it earns a lot number, and any tote that fails a station goes to the granulator instead of the sales row.
- Intake and prior-contents check. We read the original shipping label, the UN mark and the residue. No label, no unknown residue, no exceptions — anything ambiguous is treated as chemical and can never be sold as food grade.
- De-valving. Ball valve, dust cap, gasket and 6" lid come off and go to the parts bench. Roughly one in three valves is rebuildable; the rest are replaced.
- Interior wash. Triple rinse with recovered water as the baseline, hot caustic clean-in-place for anything oily, live steam for anything that sets up.
- Exterior wash and de-labelling. Cage, pallet and bottle exterior are pressure-washed; old placards and DOT labels are removed so the next shipper is not carrying someone else's hazard class.
- Cage straightening. Bent tubes are pressed back to square on the jig. Broken welds are re-welded and cold-galvanised.
- Rebuild. New gasket every time. New or rebuilt valve, new cap, new lid o-ring.
- Leak test. Water fill and a hold at working pressure with the valve open and shut, plus a lid seal check. Anything that weeps is pulled.
- Grade, photograph, lot-number, wrap. The photo is what you see before you approve the load.
Grades, and what each one is honestly good for
Grade is not a marketing tier. It is a shorthand for four physical facts: how clear the bottle is, how straight the cage is, what was in it, and how the valve behaves. Buy the lowest grade that will do your job — a car wash does not need a food grade tote and paying for one is money set on fire.
| Grade | Bottle | Cage & pallet | Typical prior contents | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A — Food | Clear, no staining, no odour | Square, no repairs, composite or plastic pallet | Corn syrup, juice concentrate, vinegar, glycerin, food oils | Beverage, ag feed, potable-adjacent storage |
| A — Industrial | Clear to light haze | Square, minor cosmetic marks | Surfactants, glycols, mild detergents | Chemical blending, dosing, clean water |
| B — Standard | Hazed or lightly stained, sound | One or two straightened tubes, sound welds | Lubricants, coolants, soaps, adhesives | Rinse water, wash bays, bulk transfer, construction |
| C — Non-potable | Stained, opaque patches, sound walls | Repaired welds, cosmetic dents | Mixed industrial, unknown-but-benign | Irrigation, dust suppression, ballast, erosion control |
Rebottled units sit alongside this scale rather than inside it: a brand-new bottle in a reclaimed cage, graded R. If you want an A-grade interior at a B-grade price, that is usually the answer.
Specifications you can put on a drawing
- Nominal capacity
- 275 gal / 1,000 L · 330 gal / 1,250 L
- Footprint
- 48" × 40" (1,219 × 1,016 mm)
- Height
- 46" (275 gal) · 53" (330 gal)
- Tare weight
- ≈ 127 lb composite pallet · ≈ 148 lb steel pallet
- Gross weight, water
- ≈ 2,420 lb (275 gal) · ≈ 2,880 lb (330 gal)
- Bottle
- Natural HDPE, UV-inhibited, ≈ 39 lb
- Cage
- Galvanised tubular steel, welded, ≈ 66 lb
- Outlet
- 2" NPT ball valve, S60×6 buttress outlet, dust cap
- Fill opening
- 6" (150 mm) screw lid with vented option
- UN marking
- 31HA1 where the original mark is legible and intact
- Stacking
- 2 high filled in transit · 3 high empty in the yard
- Temperature range
- −0.4 °F to 140 °F (−18 °C to 60 °C) content dependent
The 275 and the 330 share a footprint, which is the detail people miss when they plan a rack. If your pallet positions already take a 48 × 40, a 330 drops straight in and buys you 20 % more volume for about 7 inches of extra height.
Freight, quantity breaks and what a truckload looks like
Totes are light and enormous, so you are always buying air freight rather than weight freight. That makes quantity the single biggest lever on landed cost — far bigger than grade.
| Configuration | 275 gal | 330 gal | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single stacked | 26 | 26 | Standard for filled or fragile loads |
| Double stacked | 52 | 52 | Empty only; 330s need 110" of door clearance |
| LTL pallet positions | 1–6 | 1–6 | Priced per position, not per pound |
| Hot shot / gooseneck | 8–14 | 8–12 | Same-day inside 200 miles of Austin |
Below six totes, LTL usually costs more than the totes themselves and we will tell you so. In that range it is worth asking whether you can collect from Montopolis Drive, or whether we already have a truck routed past your ZIP that week — we backhaul constantly and an empty leg is a cheap leg.
How reconditioned totes fail, and how to avoid it
Second-hand containers do fail. Nearly all of it is predictable, and nearly all of it traces back to one of five things.
- Chemical incompatibility. HDPE is superb with caustics and poor with aromatic solvents, chlorinated solvents and strong oxidisers. Check the resin compatibility of your product before the tote, not after.
- UV embrittlement. A tote left in direct Texas sun for three summers will chalk and crack at the top radius. Shade it, tarp it, or accept a shorter life.
- Overstacking. Two high filled is the limit. We have seen a third layer added on a hot slab and the bottom bottle simply spread until the cage cut it.
- Forklift damage. Almost every scrapped cage in our yard was killed by a tine, not by age. Enter from the pallet side and slow down.
- The wrong grade. A stained C-grade tote holding a light-coloured product will discolour it. That is not a defect; that is a specification error.
The tote is rarely the weak point. The gasket, the forklift driver and the sun are the weak points.
?Common questions
Questions people actually ask
Is a reconditioned IBC tote safe for drinking water?
Only an A-grade food tote should ever go near potable water, and even then we recommend a dedicated potable-water build: new bottle, new valve, new gasket, food-grade lubricant. Reconditioned industrial totes carry residues at parts-per-million levels that are harmless in a wash bay and unacceptable in a glass. For rainwater used on ornamental plants, B grade is fine.
Do reconditioned totes still carry their UN certification?
The 31HA1 mark stays on the cage plate, but a UN mark certifies the container as it was originally built and tested. Once a tote has been in service the certification for hazardous transport has to be re-established by a competent authority — that is a recertification service, not a resale claim. For non-regulated products the original mark is informative but not legally load-bearing. See our guide to UN markings for the detail.
How long does a reconditioned tote last?
Indoors, on a level slab, holding something compatible, a B-grade tote will do ten to fifteen years. Outdoors in Central Texas sun with no cover, expect three to five before the top surface chalks and the bottle loses impact strength. The cage almost always outlives the bottle, which is exactly why rebottling exists.
Can I see photos before I commit?
Yes, and you should. Every lot is photographed at grading — bottle interior through the lid, valve, cage, pallet and the data plate. We send the set with the quote. If the load that arrives does not match the photos, it goes back on our truck at our cost.
What is the minimum order?
One. We will sell a single tote off the yard for pickup. For delivery the economics start working at six and get good at twenty-six, which is a full single-stacked van.
»Keep reading
How our grading scale works
The full A / B / C / R definitions with photographs of each.
Send us your own totes to wash
We recondition customer-owned fleets on a per-unit basis.