The boring, beautiful work of not wasting boxes.
We are a Milwaukee-area yard with a single obsession: finding a second, third, or fifth life for industrial packaging that's perfectly good — and the truck-loads of money it costs to make those boxes in the first place.
Want to work with us? Same form.
Whether you're sizing up a partnership, scheduling a tour, or sending an empty trailer our way — drop the basics in below.
Four doors into our world.
Our Story
How a single trailer of empty Gaylords turned into a 60,000 sq ft Oak Creek yard.
Read →02 / ManifestoSustainability Manifesto
What we believe about packaging waste, how we measure it, and what we are actually doing about it.
Read →03 / ProcessHow We Work
Trailer to trailer in four documented steps. Intake, grade, recondition, dispatch.
Read →04 / QualityQuality & Inspection — Grades A through D, demystified.
What our grade letters actually mean, what we won't ship, and how we calibrate human inspectors against each other.
Read →Who we are, specifically.
IBC Tanks Milwaukee is family-owned. We are not a broker, not a franchise, not a marketplace. We do not have outside investors. We have a 60,000-square-foot indoor yard in Oak Creek with three dock-high doors, two forklifts, a baler, an IBC wash station, and a working coffee machine. The people on the dock are people we employ directly.
Decisions get made at the yard. Quotes get written by the people who would have to pick the boxes. If you call our reverse-logistics lead, you are calling someone who has, at some point in the last month, personally inspected a Gaylord box that ended up on your dock.
Quick facts at a glance.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Yard founded | 2014 |
| Yard size | ~60,000 sq ft indoor |
| Dock-high doors | 3 |
| Total employees | 14 (12 floor / 2 office) |
| Inspection rubric in use | 14-page document, calibrated weekly |
| Routine ship region | WI · IL · IN · MN · IA · MI · MO |
| Cumulative boxes reclaimed | ~410,000 units |
| Closed-loop programs running | 11 (as of May 2026) |
| Reuse rate (portfolio average) | 87.9% (2025) |
| Landfill diversion since 2021 | 100% |
What we believe, in three short bullets.
Used boxes deserve a second life.
Most industrial packaging gets thrown out long before it's structurally exhausted. We exist to capture that wasted value — for buyers, sellers, and the carbon math.
Honest grading beats clever marketing.
Our rubric is published. Our inspectors calibrate weekly. If a load misses what we promised, we take it back. The reputation is a long game.
Email is faster than a phone call.
It has a paper trail. It gets answered by the right person. It respects everyone's time. We've never looked back.