Four Tons of Valves We Cannot Place
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Valves and gaskets are under half a pound per unit and the only material stream from this plant with no outlet. Mixed polypropylene, EPDM and occasionally a metal insert, uneconomic to separate at our volumes. We stockpile them — about four tons — rather than landfill them.
We publish a zero-landfill claim and it is true. Every stream out of this building has an identified home: bottles to regrind, cages and steel bases to the galvanised scrap market, timber to mulch and boiler fuel, wash-loop solids to energy recovery, the oil fraction to a used-oil reclaimer, spent caustic neutralised under permit.
Except one. There is a pile in the corner of bay three and it is getting bigger.
What the problem is
A discharge valve and its gasket together weigh under half a pound. It sounds trivial and at 66,000 units a year it is not — it is roughly fifteen tons a year passing through, of which we currently place approximately none.
The reason is that a valve is not a material, it is an assembly:
- A polypropylene or glass-filled polypropylene body.
- An EPDM or nitrile seal, chemically bonded or mechanically captured.
- Occasionally a stainless or brass stem, spindle or insert.
- Occasionally a different polymer for the handle.
- A thread interface that has been in contact with an unknown product.
Separate those cleanly and each fraction has a market. Do not separate them and the whole thing is mixed plastic with metal contamination, which has no market at all.
Why we have not just separated them
We have costed it three times.
Manual disassembly runs about ninety seconds a valve to get a clean polypropylene body, a clean elastomer and any metal out. At our volume that is roughly one and a half full-time positions, to produce perhaps $9,000 a year of low-grade mixed polypropylene. The arithmetic is not close.
Mechanical separation — shred and then sort by density or by eddy current — needs a line sized for far more material than we generate. The equipment exists and the minimum viable throughput is perhaps twenty times ours.
Which is the honest shape of the problem: it is not technically hard, it is a scale mismatch. Somebody processing valves from the whole region could do it economically. One yard in St. Louis cannot.
What we have tried
| Approach | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Mixed plastics reprocessor | Declined — metal contamination and unknown prior contents |
| Energy recovery | Declined at our volume; the chlorine risk profile needs characterisation we cannot fund |
| Resale as reclaimed parts | Works for perhaps 15% — the rest fail seat inspection |
| Manual disassembly in-house | Costed three times; roughly 1.5 FTE for $9,000 of output |
| Regional aggregation with other yards | Two conversations, no agreement yet. Our best current hope |
| Return to valve manufacturers | No take-back programme exists that we have found |
The resale line is the one bright spot. When a bottle fails but its valve seat is sound, we clean it, test it and sell it as a reclaimed part at about a third of new — which is a genuine reuse win and the reason our parts shelf exists. It absorbs roughly 15% of the stream. The other 85% has a scored or hardened seat and we will not sell it.
Why we do not just bury it
Because the pledge is not a number, it is a decision rule: when a stream has no outlet, we stop or we store. We do not bury.
So there is about four tons of valves in bay three, in bulk bags, taking up a pallet position we would rather use for something else. It grows by roughly a ton a year net of the resale fraction.
That is not a solution. It is a deferral, and at some point either an outlet appears or the pile becomes genuinely inconvenient. We would rather be honest about that than round it out of the reporting.
What would actually fix it
Three things, roughly in order of likelihood.
- Regional aggregation. If four or five reclaim yards in the Midwest pooled their valve streams, the combined volume would justify a sorting line. We have had two conversations about this and no agreement. If you run a yard and you want to talk, write to us.
- Design change upstream. A valve designed for disassembly — a captured seal rather than a bonded one, a single polymer family — would make this trivial. That is a conversation with manufacturers, not with us.
- A take-back programme from valve manufacturers. None exists that we have been able to find.
Why this page exists
A sustainability section that is entirely achievements is a marketing document. We publish our method so customers can argue with it, we publish our numbers with their ranges, and we publish the part that does not work.
Four tons of valves is the least impressive paragraph on this website. It is also the one that makes the rest of it believable.
802 words · published 13 May 2025 by Marguerite Okonkwo, Operations lead at IBC Tote Market LLC. We correct posts rather than quietly deleting them; if something here is wrong, tell us and we will say what changed.