Home / The Reclaim Counter
The Reclaim Counter, opened up.
The number ticking on our homepage isn't a flourish — it's a real, conservative count of the totes we've kept out of landfills since January 2019. Here's exactly how the math works.
See your impact in this number
Same form, every page. Tell us what you've got or what you need; we send a real quote (not a sales drip).
The base unit
One tote diverted = one IBC tote that we either resold reconditioned, rebottled, or accepted into our recycling line for in-house pelletization. We do not count totes we merely transported on behalf of others.
The conversions
| Output metric | Multiplier per tote | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Virgin HDPE displaced | 19.1 kg | NA-IBC industry survey 2024 — average bottle weight |
| CO₂e avoided (cradle-to-gate) | 38.4 kg | 19.1 kg × 2.01 kgCO₂e/kg HDPE (Plastics Europe Eco-profile, 2023) |
| Capacity reused | 275 gal | Nominal — uses the smaller of 275/330 to be conservative |
| Cage steel reused | 22 kg | Galvanized steel cage typical mass |
The cadence
The counter advances based on our actual yard-management software, dumped nightly into a static asset on this site. Between updates, the page interpolates at our trailing 90-day average rate of one tote every ~12 seconds.
This means the number on screen is always within ±0.3% of the actual settled count. We chose that error margin because being more precise would require live database calls on every page load — which would burn carbon to display a carbon-saving number, which would be ridiculous.
What we don't count
- Totes we merely transported between two other parties.
- Manufacturing emissions from our own cleaning chemistry (it's small, but for honesty we exclude rather than include).
- End-of-life COâ‚‚ released when our regrind pellets eventually become products that fail. That's downstream of us.
The cumulative impact since 2019
Each year's contribution to the running total. The yard has been operating since October 2019; full operating years start in 2020.
| Year | Totes | HDPE saved (kg) | COâ‚‚e avoided (kg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 (partial year) | 620 | 11,842 | 23,801 |
| 2020 | 2,840 | 54,244 | 109,031 |
| 2021 | 5,950 | 113,645 | 228,427 |
| 2022 | 10,400 | 198,640 | 399,267 |
| 2023 | 14,820 | 283,062 | 569,088 |
| 2024 | 18,206 | 347,734 | 698,945 |
| 2025 | 21,604 | 412,636 | 829,594 |
| Cumulative | 74,440 | 1,421,803 | 2,858,153 |
Putting the COâ‚‚ number in context
2.86 million kg COâ‚‚e avoided cumulatively is a real number, but it's hard to feel. A few comparisons:
- Equivalent to 622 average passenger cars driven for one year (EPA factor: 4,600 kg COâ‚‚/car/year).
- Equivalent to ~1,150 round-trip flights New York to London.
- Equivalent to powering ~390 average US homes for a year.
- Equivalent to the annual carbon sequestration of ~37,000 mature trees.
Those comparisons are meant to help intuition, not as carbon-credit equivalents (which we don't sell or buy).
Why we publish a real number, not an estimate
Many sustainability claims are hand-wavy estimates. Ours isn't, and the reason matters.
An estimate gives you a number that's directionally correct but unverifiable — and unverifiable claims tend to drift over time. They become marketing instead of measurement.
A real, audited number is harder to produce but stays honest. The third-party auditor catches errors and pushes back on optimistic methodology choices. The annual review is uncomfortable in good ways.
The Reclaim Counter advances based on real yard-management software outputs. The COâ‚‚ multiplier is from a published industry source (Plastics Europe Eco-profile, 2023). The interpolation between database refreshes uses our trailing 90-day actual rate. None of this is invented; all of it is documented.