A year of diversion statements, in numbers

A diversion statement is a document showing, for a load or a period, how much material went to reuse, rebottling, repair and reclaim, against anything that could not be recovered. Sustainability teams use them directly in reporting, which means they have to be arithmetic rather than adjectives.

What the 61% depends on

Almost entirely on documentation. The single biggest determinant of whether a container can be reused is whether we know what was in it, and that is a question about the seller's paperwork rather than about the container's condition.

Undocumented stock cannot enter the reuse stream at all. It goes to reclaim, which is a good outcome and a much worse one than it needed to be. If there is one thing a seller can do to improve both their price and the environmental result, it is finding one old bill of lading.

What the 15% is made of

Mostly bottles. Crazing, retained odour, permanent deformation and impact damage, in roughly that order. The cages under those bottles overwhelmingly did not fail, which is why the rebottling figure exists at all.

A meaningful share of the reclaim tonnage is therefore steel that arrived attached to a dead bottle and left attached to a live one. That movement between rows is invisible in the table and is most of what the cage shop does.

The 6% we do not like

Residue routed to licensed treatment, contamination that arrived mixed into loads, composite fractions where materials are bonded in ways we cannot separate economically, and a small amount of genuinely unidentifiable material.

We publish it rather than rounding it away, partly because a 100% figure would be a lie and partly because writing the number down every quarter is what makes anyone work on it.

How the figures are produced

Streams are weighed as they leave. Inbound is counted and weighed at intake. Outcomes are recorded per unit against the serial, and the aggregate is the sum rather than an estimate scaled from a sample.

The carbon and water figures we quote elsewhere are conservative planning estimates from component masses and published production intensities. The disposition figures on this page are not estimates; they are weights.

What a customer gets

For a single load: unit counts and tonnage split by outcome. For a programme customer: the same, quarterly, at serial level, alongside turns per container, wash cycles, repairs and losses.

If you need to put a number in an external report, ask for the component-level worksheet as well. Your team should be able to audit our assumptions rather than take them on trust.

How to read a diversion statement critically

Not all of them mean the same thing, and the differences are worth knowing before you put a number in a report.

• By mass or by unit count? Mass is harder to game and is what most reporting frameworks want. Unit counts flatter operations that reuse light components and reclaim heavy ones.
• Is reuse separated from recycling? A statement showing 94% diverted without splitting reuse from reclaim is hiding the most important distinction in the document.
• Is the remainder stated? A figure that adds to exactly 100% has usually had something rounded away.
• Weighed or estimated? Ask. Weighed streams are auditable; sampled estimates scaled to a period are not.
• Does it cover your containers or the whole facility? Both are legitimate; they are not the same claim.

What we would change about our own figures

Two things, honestly.

First, our reuse figure includes containers that went back into service after washing regardless of how many further cycles they achieve. A container reused once and a container reused eight times count the same, and the second is worth far more. We do not currently track downstream cycles for stock we sell outright, only for programme fleets.

Second, the disposition figures are weights and the carbon figures are estimates, and putting them on the same page invites people to treat both with the same confidence. They should not.

What customers do with them

Mostly three things: packaging circularity reporting, internal justification for buying reconditioned rather than new, and evidence in customer or retailer sustainability questionnaires.

The third is the fastest-growing. Buyers are increasingly asked what happens to their packaging at end of life, and "we sell it to a recycler" is no longer an adequate answer without a document behind it.

Asking for the worksheet

If a figure is going into an external report, ask for the component-level worksheet as well as the statement. It shows the masses, the emission factors and the assumptions, and it lets your team substitute their own factors where their methodology requires it.

Any supplier who cannot produce that has given you a marketing number rather than a measurement.

Questions about the figures

Why not report by unit count? Because it flatters. Reusing a light component and reclaiming a heavy one looks identical by count and is very different by mass, and mass is what reporting frameworks want.

Is 94% good? It is better than most and it is not a finish line. The number that matters more is the split within it — 61% straight back into service is the figure we would defend, because reuse and reclaim are not equivalent outcomes dressed as one.

Can we get a statement for our containers specifically? Yes, per load or per period. Programme customers get it quarterly at serial level as standard.

Do you audit these? Internally, by reconciling weighed streams against intake weights. We have not commissioned an external audit, and we say so rather than implying certification we do not hold.