Every truckload of empties we buy comes with a piece of paper. The paper lists, by tote, what each one held last. We will not write a check without it. Some sellers are surprised by this. Some try to argue. The rule does not move.
Why this is the rule
In late 2015 we bought a 24-tote lot from a broker who told us, plausibly, that the totes had held food-grade glycerin. The lot looked clean. The smell test passed on a quick inspection. We routed the totes to our food line, washed them, and sold them on to a small food co-packer.
Three months later one of those totes — we know which one — leached a faint petroleum residue into a batch of edible oil. The co-packer caught it on their incoming QA, before it ever shipped to a consumer. Best case for everyone. The traceback showed that the “food-grade glycerin” story had been the broker’s, not the actual prior owner’s. The real prior content was a hydrocarbon-cutting solvent. Surface residue had cleaned off easily; the wall absorption had not.
We paid for the co-packer’s ruined batch. We pulled every tote from that lot. We instituted the policy that has not moved since: no documentation, no purchase, no exception.
What documentation looks like
For a clean buy, we want:
- The seller’s contact and signature on the manifest.
- Prior contents listed by tote, or by lot if the totes are from a single product stream.
- For chemical service: an SDS for each prior content.
- For food service: a statement of the food product or category.
- For unknowns: an honest “we don’t know” — which still has to be on paper, and routes the lot to industrial or end-of-life rather than food.
The honest unknown
The harder rule is on totes whose prior contents the seller genuinely does not know. We still take some of those — but they go to industrial-grade only, or directly to material recovery. They cannot enter the food pool. Selling that distinction to a seller who wants top dollar takes a conversation. Sometimes the conversation does not end in a sale. That is correct. We will not pollute our food line for a single truckload.