The folks who run the loop.
Eleven people, one yard, one mission. Everyone you talk to actually works here — no outsourced sales, no offshore call center, no chatbot pretending to be Sarah.
Want to talk to a real person?
Same form, every page. Tell us what you've got or what you need; we send a real quote (not a sales drip).
The crew
Founder & yard manager
Ten years dispatching chemical freight before he got tired of watching pristine totes get crushed. Spent the first six months as the only employee.
Reconditioning lead
Runs the wash bay. Re-engineered the closed-loop water reclaim from 71% to 92% recovery in eighteen months.
Fabrication & welding
Built the IBC-to-aquaponics rig that ended up in three central-Ohio high-school greenhouses. Will absolutely show you the cutting jig.
Dispatcher
Routes every truck, knows the rest stops between Fargo and Sioux City by their bathroom quality, and keeps freight quotes honest.
Driver — Class A
Lead driver on the WI/IA loop. Has personally moved more totes than the rest of us combined.
Inventory & QC
Inspects every incoming load. Designed the 7-step grading rubric we use for every food-grade certification.
We don't post full names without consent. If you want to reach a specific person, email hello@ibccolumbus.com and we'll forward.
Walk the yard
Receiving
Trucks roll in here. Every load gets photographed, weighed, and sorted by grade before anything moves to the wash bay.
Wash bay
Two heated bays. Triple rinse plus caustic for industrial; food-grade gets an additional sodium hydroxide cycle and a high-pressure final rinse.
Cage shop
Bent cages get straightened on a hydraulic jig built from an old forklift mast. We refurbish ~94% of incoming cages.
Granulator
End-of-life bottles get shredded, washed, and pelletized on-site. The pellets sell to molders within 300 miles.
Outbound
Reconditioned totes get a new label, a fresh seal, and a pallet. Outbound trucks usually leave with a backhaul booked.
The office
A converted shipping container with very good coffee and a wall-mounted dashboard of the Reclaim Counter, updated in real time.
Want a tour? Email us — we run informal tours Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
A typical day at the yard
If you're trying to picture what we actually do all day, here's a sample Wednesday from earlier this year, in rough chronological order.
- 7:30 AMYard opens. Receiving inspector checks the gate and the security log.
- 7:45 AMFirst inbound truck of the day — 18 totes from a coolant supplier in Indianapolis. Photos, weight, label scan.
- 8:00 AMWash bay starts the first batch — 12 industrial reconditioned totes from yesterday's intake.
- 8:30 AMDispatcher publishes the day's outbound routes. Two trucks rolling — one to Cincinnati, one to Cleveland.
- 9:00 AMCage shop opens. First straightening jobs of the day on a stack of bowed cages from a recent buy-back.
- 10:00 AMWalk-in customer arrives — small soap maker picking up two rebottled totes. Loaded in 15 minutes.
- 10:30 AMGranulator runs its morning shift. Today's batch is HDPE from end-of-life bottles received last week.
- 11:30 AMWash bay finishes the morning batch. 12 totes go to QC for inspection and labeling.
- 12:00 PMLunch. Most of the team eats together in the office container.
- 1:00 PMCincinnati truck calls in — drop completed, pickup en route. Backhaul has 22 totes from a brewery.
- 2:00 PMFab shop welder finishes a custom manifold for a maple-sap rig customer.
- 2:30 PMSecond wash batch starts — 8 food-grade rebottled for the Soap Collective.
- 3:30 PMCleveland truck returns — empty backhaul today (one of the rare misses).
- 4:00 PMInventory inspector logs the day's outputs. Tomorrow's wash batch gets prepped.
- 5:30 PMYard closes. Office stays open another 30 minutes for end-of-day email replies.
How we hire
We don't have a fancy ATS or a recruiting funnel. People email hello@ibccolumbus.com with a few sentences about their background, and a real human reads it within a week.
What we look for, regardless of role:
- Track record of doing the work, not talking about doing the work.
- Comfort with feedback — we run small enough that we can't afford people who don't take coaching.
- Willingness to learn the unglamorous parts of the business. Every employee, including the founder, has run a wash cycle and counted totes.
- A reasonable commute. We hire local because the team works better when nobody's exhausted from driving an hour each way.
Open roles are posted on /careers. If nothing fits but you'd like to be on file, email anyway. We circle back when something opens up.