The 'tote shortage' of 2021, in retrospect

Most people in the chemical and food sectors remember 2021 as the year you couldn't get an IBC tote. New-tote lead times stretched from 2 weeks to 4 months. Reconditioned-tote inventory across the country went to functional zero. Customers we'd never met were calling us cold, asking if we had anything, anything at all.

What actually caused it, in rough order:

1. Hurricane Ida (Aug 2021) hit petrochemical capacity in the Gulf coast. HDPE production runs through a handful of crackers there. Ida took multiple plants offline. Resin pricing doubled within weeks; some grades were on allocation for a year.

2. Container-shipping bottleneck. New IBC totes from the major OEMs are partially manufactured overseas (cages and bottles often ship as components). Container-shipping rates from Asia to the US went from $2,000/box to $20,000/box in 2021. Lead times collapsed.

3. Post-COVID demand surge. Industrial chemistry demand snapped back faster than packaging supply. Every distributor was suddenly long on liquid product, short on containers to ship it in.

4. Trucking capacity shortage. Even when totes existed, you couldn't always get them moved. Driver shortage + warehouse staffing crisis = freight delays.

5. Reconditioning capacity didn't fill the gap. There aren't that many real reconditioning yards in the US. We're one. There are maybe 30 nationally with real wash protocols. We were running flat out and still couldn't keep up with demand.

What we learned, looking back:

• Local supply chains matter more than they look during normal times. Regional yards (us, our peers) absorbed a lot of the demand shock that import-dependent supply couldn't cover.
• Reuse is structural resilience. A regional fleet of reconditionable totes is a buffer against global supply shocks. Customers who already had fleet inventory in 2021 just kept running; customers who relied on just-in-time procurement got squeezed.
• Long-term relationships beat spot pricing. Customers we'd been working with for years got first allocation on what we had. New customers got what was left. Not unfair — just the reality of a constrained market.
• The shortage is what motivated several of our customers to start tote co-ops. The Twin Cities Soap Collective came out of 2021. So did one of our brewery fleet partnerships.

We hope we never see another year like that. We're better positioned for it now. We have more reconditioning throughput, deeper inventory, and we've added the cage shop capacity we lacked then.

But the deeper lesson is structural: a yard like ours exists partly because of what happens when global supply chains hiccup. Every reconditioned tote is a hedge against the next 2021.