Every multi-site reusable container programme we have been involved with loses population. The rate ranges from about 8% a year at the best-run operations to over 30% at the worst, and the first instinct is always that somebody is taking them. Occasionally somebody is. Mostly the containers are still in your building.
Where they actually go
| Destination | Share of attrition |
|---|---|
| Repurposed internally and never returned to the pool | 31% |
| Retired through damage, not replaced | 26% |
| Stranded at a receiving site | 19% |
| Shipped out with product by mistake | 12% |
| Baled by the site's own waste process | 8% |
| Genuinely unaccounted for | 4% |
1 · Repurposed internally
The largest category and the most human. A good container is useful. Somebody needs somewhere to put offcuts, or a parts store, or a temporary bin for a project. The container leaves the pool and becomes furniture.
The fix is not policing. It is supplying cheap, visibly different containers for internal use — grade C material, marked, explicitly not pool stock. Once there is a legitimate option, the pool stops being raided.
2 · Retired without replacement
Containers die. That is expected and should be budgeted. What goes wrong is that nobody is counting, so the population silently declines until somebody notices a shortage and places an emergency order for new containers — the exact outcome the programme existed to avoid.
A quarterly count, and a replacement budget sized to your observed attrition rate, solves this entirely and costs a morning.
3 · Stranded at a receiving site
Containers accumulate at the receiving end because the return leg has no owner. They stack up behind a rack, out of the way, and become invisible. We have walked into receiving yards and found four months of pool population behind a wall nobody had looked at since spring.
Before you order replacement containers, walk the receiving site. We have never done this and found nothing.
4 · Shipped out with product
Twelve percent, and almost always a labelling problem. If a pool container looks like a disposable one, it will eventually go out with product on a load that nobody expected to contain it.
Mark them. Not subtly — a stencil, a colour band, something visible from across a dock. We mark our own tracked containers with a stencil in the bottom-left corner of the long panel, and the marking alone has measurably reduced loss.
5 · Baled by your own waste process
Eight percent of attrition is containers being destroyed by the site's own recycling contractor, who was doing exactly what they were asked to do: take away the cardboard.
This one is pure communication. Whoever handles your waste stream needs to know what pool stock looks like, and there needs to be a physically separate place to put it.
What a low-attrition programme looks like
- Containers visibly marked as pool stock.
- Cheap alternative containers available for internal repurposing.
- A named owner for empties at every node, with it in their objectives.
- Scheduled return freight rather than requested return freight.
- Quarterly counts, with a replacement budget sized to observed attrition.
- Your waste contractor briefed, with a separate physical area for pool stock.
- 20% slack in the population so a bad quarter does not trigger emergency purchasing.
The number that tells you the truth
Trips per container per year. If it is rising, your pool is healthy regardless of what the attrition rate looks like. If it is flat while your volume grows, you are buying your way out of a process problem and the attrition number is a symptom rather than the disease.
Our pieces are written by the people who do the work rather than by a content agency, which is why they contain more numbers and fewer adjectives than is fashionable. If a figure here does not match your experience, we would genuinely like to hear about it — two of our published coefficients have changed that way.