Our story
Talk to the yard
Whether you are buying, selling or writing about us — this form reaches the same desk. Tell us what you are after.
The premise
The packaging industry is very good at making containers and extremely bad at retrieving them. A gaylord box is manufactured, filled once, shipped once, emptied, and then — in the overwhelming majority of cases — flattened into a compactor within an hour of being unloaded. It is, at that moment, structurally identical to the box the same plant will buy new next Tuesday.
Everything we do follows from taking that absurdity seriously. Not as a slogan: as a logistics problem with an inventory ledger, a grading standard, a repair bench and a fleet attached to it. Reuse is not a moral posture at ReGaylord. It is the product.
The environmental case is almost embarrassingly strong, which is why we publish the arithmetic rather than the adjectives. Re-running an existing five-wall gaylord avoids roughly 23 pounds of CO₂e compared with manufacturing its replacement from virgin fibre. It avoids around 65 gallons of process water. It keeps 24 pounds of board out of a landfill or, at best, out of a pulper that would have shortened the fibre by another cycle. Multiply by the forty thousand boxes that pass through this yard every month and the numbers stop being decorative.
What we are not is precious about it. Sometimes a customer genuinely needs new board — food contact without a liner, an export spec, a printed box for a retail programme. We will source that, and we will tell you honestly when used stock is the wrong answer. A reuse company that oversells reuse is just another vendor.
How it happened
No investment round, no pivot, no rebrand. Mostly just buying a slightly bigger building every few years and refusing to throw anything away.
2009
Odell Marchetti was driving a recycling route past a Kansas City plastics compounder that was paying to landfill perfectly square five-wall gaylords. He asked what they wanted for them. They said take them. He rented a 24-foot box truck that Saturday and sold the first load to a seed processor in Topeka on the Tuesday.
2011
The first lease — one bay, one dock, no forklift for the first three months. Boxes were graded on the floor by eye and stacked against the wall by size. Two of the customers from that year still buy every month.
2013
Reuse only scales if the buyer trusts the description. We stopped saying 'good' and 'rough' and published a five-rung ladder — 1A through 5A — with written reject criteria for each. It is still the same ladder, with one clarification added in 2018 about moisture.
2015
We had been baling boxes that needed twenty minutes of work. A bench, a stapler, a roll of reinforced tape and one patient person turned roughly a third of our reject stream back into sellable 3A stock.
2017
A partner who had spent a decade in truckload brokerage joined and brought the thing we were missing: control of the trucks. Backhaul matching dropped the delivered cost of a used box below anything a converting plant could quote.
2019
We installed a horizontal baler so that the end of a box's life happened here, under our own roof, weighed and documented. That was the year we committed publicly that nothing arriving at Fiberglass Rd would ever be landfilled. We have not broken it.
2022
The yard reached the scale where we could hold real depth in every standard footprint — which is the point at which a customer can actually switch a production line to used stock without gambling on availability.
2024
Boxes too damaged to run whole still contain square feet of perfect board. A die-cutting table turned that into pads, dividers, trays and display bases, and gave the reject stream a second destination above the baler.
2026
Core truckload lanes in fourteen states, nationwide LTL, and a customer diversion report that a sustainability team can drop into an annual filing without editing it first.
What we will not do
You can build a reuse business on trust or on volume. If you pick volume first, you lose the trust and then you lose the volume.
Every lot is physically inspected here before it is offered. We have turned down same-day orders rather than ship a load nobody had opened.
Reuse, recondition, fabricate, bale. Those are the four exits from this building. There is no fifth.
No hazardous residue, no food spoilage, no unidentified powders. It protects our people and it protects the next customer.
Everything is written: specs, counts, grades, photographs, freight. It is slower for thirty seconds and faster for the following three weeks.
Keep reading
What 68,000 square feet of graded corrugated actually looks like, and the equipment that keeps it moving.
Open6:40 AM to 5:10 PM, told through one Tuesday and about nine hundred boxes.
OpenThe measurement framework, the assumptions behind it, and what we report back to customers.
OpenThe people
Thirty-one people, most of them on the floor. These are the ones you are likely to hear from or hear about.
By the numbers
Published because a reuse company that will not show its own proportions is a recycler with a better website.
| Measure | Figure | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2009 | One rented 24-foot box truck |
| People | 31 | Most of them on the floor |
| Under roof | 68,000 sq ft | All dry storage |
| Dock doors | 9 dock-high, 2 drive-in | 3 dedicated inbound, 6 outbound |
| Containers handled | ≈ 40,000 / month | Roughly 480,000 grading decisions a year |
| Standing stock | 18,000 – 26,000 | Racked by footprint then grade |
| Footprints stocked | 22 | From a 30-inch cube to a 60-inch tall five-wall |
| Reuse share of inbound | 71% | Sold to run again as-is |
| Reconditioned share | 12% | ≈ 1,100 boxes a month across the bench |
| Fabricated share | 6% | Cut into pads, dividers, trays |
| Baled share | 11% | Genuine end of life only |
| Landfilled | 0% | Written policy since 2019 |
| Average further trips | 3.4 | Across placed stock, measured over two years |
| Core lanes | 14 states | Plus nationwide LTL and truckload |
| Miles on backhaul | 38% | Matched to trucks already running |
| Quote turnaround | 1 business day | Every request read by a buyer |
Questions we get asked
Both, in that order of preference. Seventy-one per cent of what arrives is sold to run again and eleven per cent is baled. Those proportions are the honest measure of a reuse company and we publish ours.
Six tractors, two flatbeds, three liftgate box trucks and a roll-off tractor, plus brokered capacity under our own authority. Controlling freight is why used boxes are affordable at distance.
Every quote depends on sizes, grades, counts, photographs and freight that have to be written down anyway. Writing them first is thirty seconds slower and three weeks faster.
Usually. Graders, forklift operators, CDL-A drivers, a bench technician and a fabricator. Applications are kept on file and we do come back to people.
Yes, by appointment, most weeks. Customers who come once tend to buy on specification rather than on photographs ever after.
Odell Marchetti and Ruthanne Pilcher. No outside investment, no acquisition, no parent company. Which is why the four rules above have survived.
If you have boxes going out, we will buy them. If you need boxes coming in, we have them graded and ready. Tell us which.
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