Before
Tell us what you want to see
A specific footprint, the grading process, the repair bench, or just the general shape of it. We will have the relevant stock accessible.
The company · facility
Sixty-eight thousand square feet of second chances.
One building does five jobs: receiving, grading, storage, repair and recycling. Here is how it is laid out, what runs in it, and why the floor plan is the reason we can quote a real grade instead of a hopeful one.
- Under roof
- 68,000 sq ft, all dry
- Dock doors
- 9 dock-high, 2 drive-in
- Standing stock
- 18,000 – 26,000 boxes
Book a yard visit
Customers are welcome on the floor by appointment. Tell us roughly when and what you want to see.
Layout
A box only travels one direction through the building.
Receiving at the east end, baler at the west. Nothing doubles back, which is how a load gets graded the day it lands instead of the week it lands.
The east wall is receiving: three dock doors dedicated to inbound, with a staging apron big enough to break down two full truckloads at once without blocking the aisle. Loads are counted off the trailer and photographed before a single box is moved, which settles almost every discrepancy before it becomes one.
The centre bay is the grading run — four lanes, each with a bench, a light bar and a moisture meter. A grader opens every box. Not a sample: every box. It sounds inefficient until you have shipped one bad pallet to a customer who then stops buying used altogether.
Storage sits north and south of the grading run, racked by footprint and then by grade, so a 48 × 40 × 36 five-wall in 2A lives in exactly one place and a picker never has to guess. Flattened boxes are banded in lots of twenty-five and stacked no more than nine bands high, because the tenth band is where crush damage starts showing up in our own inspections.
The west end holds the repair bench, the die-cutting table and the horizontal baler — the three exits that are not the front door. Everything that cannot be sold whole goes to one of them, in that order of preference.
Zones
Six areas, each with a job.
Receiving apron
Three inbound docks, a scale, and a camera rig. Every inbound load is counted, weighed and photographed before breakdown so the seller and the buyer see the same evidence.
3 doors · 2,400 sq ft staging
Grading run
Four lanes with light bars and pin-type moisture meters. Graders work to the written 1A–5A ladder and mark each band with lot, grade and date.
Everything opened, nothing sampled
Dry storage
Racked by footprint then grade. Humidity is watched, not assumed — corrugated loses a measurable share of its edge crush strength once it climbs past roughly 10% moisture content.
18,000 – 26,000 boxes standing
Repair bench
Pneumatic stapler, reinforced gummed tape, flap and corner patch stock, and a sleeve press for rebuilding a five-wall body onto a sound base.
≈ 1,100 boxes rehabilitated a month
Cutting table
A 60-inch cutting table for pads, dividers, trays and display bases reclaimed from panels of boxes that could not run again whole.
Short runs from 50 pieces
Baler & outbound
Horizontal baler producing mill-spec OCC bales, plus six outbound doors with a dedicated load-check lane so nothing leaves unphotographed.
6 outbound doors
Fleet
Owning the trucks is what makes used boxes cheap.
A used gaylord is worth less than the freight that moves it. If you do not control the freight, you do not control the price.
| Equipment | Count | Typical job | Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|
| 53′ dry van | 6 | Graded box delivery, multi-stop metro runs | 26 floor positions · up to 52 stacked |
| 48′ flatbed | 2 | Baled OCC to mills, banded pallet lots | 44,000 lb |
| 26′ box truck w/ liftgate | 3 | Cleanouts and docks without a leveller | 12 – 14 gaylords |
| Roll-off tractor | 1 | Placed containers for staged cleanouts | 30 & 40 yd boxes |
| Counterbalance forklifts | 7 | Yard and trailer work | 5,000 lb |
| Walkie stackers | 4 | Grading run and band handling | 3,000 lb |
Inbound process
From trailer door to sellable band in four steps.
- 01
Count & photograph
Piece count against the manifest, photographs of the load as it stands, moisture spot-checks on the bottom course where damp always shows first.
- 02
Open & grade
Every box opened, checked for crush, delamination, punctures, residue and odour, then marked to a grade with the reject reason written on any box that fails.
- 03
Route
Sellable stock is flattened and banded. Repairables go to the bench. Contaminated or spent board goes to the baler, weighed, with the tonnage logged against the inbound lot.
- 04
Put away & publish
Bands are racked by footprint and grade, and the counts hit our availability sheet the same afternoon — which is the sheet a buyer reads when answering your request.
The whole cycle runs in under twenty-four hours for a standard truckload. That speed is not a boast, it is a requirement: a used box that sits wet or stacked badly for a week grades a full rung lower than the box that came off the same trailer.
Storage discipline
Why the building itself is a quality control system.
Corrugated fails from moisture, crushing and repeated folding. A yard's floor plan and roof do more for grade retention than any amount of inspection.
- Roof and envelope
- The single largest capital item that affects grade. Board at 90% relative humidity retains roughly half its compression strength, and nothing about it looks different.
- Humidity monitoring
- Watched rather than assumed. Above 65% we derate stacking; above 80% we stop stacking loaded stock entirely, whatever the season.
- Nothing on the slab
- Concrete wicks. Every band sits on a pallet or a slip sheet, which is the cheapest grade protection available anywhere.
- Nine bands maximum
- Not a regulation — an observation. The tenth band is where crush damage starts appearing at the bottom of our own stacks.
- Eighteen inches off walls
- Condensation forms on the inside face of exterior walls. A damp stripe down one side is invisible until the stack is turned.
- One-direction flow
- Receiving east, baler west. Nothing doubles back, which is how a load gets graded the day it lands rather than the week it lands.
- Racked by footprint then grade
- A 48 × 40 × 36 five-wall in 2A lives in exactly one place. Pickers never guess, and counts stay accurate.
- First in, first out
- Creep and moisture uptake are cumulative and largely irreversible. Stock rotation is a structural policy, not an inventory one.
- Moisture meters on every bench
- Eleven seconds per pallet. The most useful measurement anybody in this trade takes and almost nobody does.
Visiting
What a yard visit involves.
Customers are welcome on the floor by appointment. It takes about an hour and it changes how people buy afterwards.
On arrival
Check-in and PPE
High-visibility vest and safety footwear required on the floor. We keep spare vests; bring your own boots.
15 min
The grading run
Watch a load being opened and graded against the written ladder. This is the part that changes people's view of used packaging.
20 min
Stock walk
Your footprint, in the grades you buy, in the bands you would receive. Open boxes, turn them over, look at bottom edges.
10 min
Bench and cutting table
Where rejected containers become 3A stock or fabricated parts. About eighteen per cent of inbound goes through one of these two.
10 min
Sample bands
Take boxes away with you. Most visitors leave with a pallet to run through their own process.
Come and look at it before you buy it.
Yard visits, sample bands, and photographs of the exact lot you are quoted. Ask and we will set it up.