Four acres, thirty-one people, and a grinder you can hear from the road.

Yes. We give tours to customers deciding whether to trust us, to auditors checking a diversion claim, and to people thinking about working here. Weekday mornings are best — the sort deck is running and the grinder has not started, so you can still hear yourself think. We are at 7240 S Access Rd, Columbus, OH 43217; hi-vis and closed-toe footwear are required and we have spares. Put ‘yard tour’ in the contact form.

The gate opens at 7:00 AM and closes at 5:00 PM Monday to Friday, with a half shift on Saturday morning that is mostly yard pickup and the upcycling bench. Inbound trailers are received until 4:30 PM, but the same-day grading cut-off is 1:00 PM — anything later sits overnight, and a load that sits in the wrong weather loses a grade.

Thirty-one people: nine graders, six dismantlers and repair hands, four machine operators, five drivers, three on forklifts in the yard and four in the office. Median tenure is a bit over five years, which in this trade is unusual and is the thing we are quietly proudest of.

About eight months to full speed, at roughly two and a half seconds a unit. The first two months are spent grading behind someone experienced and having your decisions overruled, which is not fun and is the only method that works. We start people on repair rather than grading, because you cannot judge a pallet properly until you have taken a few apart.

A covered four-lane sort deck, six repair benches, two dismantlers, a build line, one horizontal grinder, a colour line, a magnetic separator, a screening deck, an ISPM-15 registered heat-treatment chamber running 56 °C core for 30 minutes, and a truck scale that every figure we publish traces back to. Plus three tractors, nine trailers, two yard trucks, six forklifts of varying dignity, and a 1997 flatbed that does not really work any more and is not going anywhere.