About Us
Company History and Philosophies
We started our company nearly 17 years ago. The small town we lived in was forced to enact zero watering bans due to an undersized well-water system. The area had experienced exponential growth and the infrastructure for freshwater had not been increased fast enough to absorb the extra homeowners.
We live on 1-3/4 acres and have always loved gardening and growing things. When the watering ban was put in place, we lost nearly $3500.00 worth of fruit trees, perennial gardens, vegetable, and berry patches. That fall, I made my first barrels. We have 11 barrels on our property and have not used a drop of city water for 18 years.
We started our company and, in the last 13 years, have grown to where we have sold and shipped over 16,000 barrels last year and are on our way to do over 18,000 this year.
We are the largest manufacturer of upcycled rain barrels in the United States. These barrels were originally used to ship food overseas to markets in the USA. Most food companies buy locally grown when it is in season. However, they pickle and repackage foods year-round.
Most of our black barrels come from India and Pakistan and contain baby gherkin pickles. Most of the terra-cotta come from Greece and have olives in them. The gray and blue come from Peru, Belgium, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain and have mint leaves, sugar beets, peppers, carrots, etc. in them.
To food manufacturers, these barrels are scrap once they empty out the food, and in most cases would be sent to a landfill. The plastic is high-density polyethylene. To recycle the plastic actually costs the food company more than sending it to the landfill.
The plastic recycling market has been depressed over the last couple of years, and the amount each place generates is not attractive enough for large-scale recyclers. Additionally, recycled plastic is limited to 20% in a new food-grade barrel (80% needs to be new petroleum pellets and resins) and structurally, once you add more than 50% recycled plastic to a new product, it does not have the stability to maintain its shape.
We have contracts with most all the food manufacturers in a 5-state area. We pick up from their dock on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to help keep their processing area free of clutter and not have the barrels shipped to a landfill. The rain barrels we sold in 2016 kept nearly 240,000 pounds or 120 tons of plastic out of landfills in the Chicagoland area. This tonnage also equates to nearly 240,000 cubic feet of landfill space.
We have the same recycling plan with fencing contractors. In the past, when they would tear down old fences, they would just load the scrap into dumpsters and haul it to the landfill. The fencing is all Western red cedar and white cedar. We use no pressure-treated lumber in our products due to arsenic leaching from them. So far this year, we have kept 14 tons or 11,520 cubic feet of fencing from landfills.
The rain barrels and tumbling composter barrels are all pre-used. The framework for our tumbling composter is recycled plastic lumber. Our pedestals are made from recycled wooden fencing. We have a vinyl automatic diverter of our own that is made from recycled vinyl fence pieces.
Our philosophy is that nothing is thrown out or not used in some products we make. We also strive to minimize our carbon footprint through the effective use of water.
We collect rainwater off the roof of our building and use it to wash and rinse the barrels. We use PH-neutral soap to wash the barrels. We tried several organic and citrus-based cleaners and were not able to remove the syrup from the cherry barrels or oil from the olives.