Behind the Scenes

This week we picked up a few triwalls of Canadian Military Surplus and so I thought I would tell you a bit about this process, without divulging too many of our trade secrets!

We start by bidding on a lot.  There is usually a general description of what is in the boxes, but no clear indication of condition or quantity. Every time we win a bid we really have no idea what we are going to get.  Some boxes are fantastic, other boxes not so great. 

Next we go and pick up the lot.  That usually means a day trip with the ever ready dad/father-in-law.  He's always ready to go for a drive and loves to help out. He's always been an entrepreneur himself so he understands what we are trying to achieve.

This time the lot consisted of 3 triwalls, a triwall is a large box about 40" x 48" x 24", so we also had to  rent a trailer to get everything back to the warehouse. We get everything in the truck and trailer and get it back to Lacombe and then we have to find space for everything in the warehouse. Just getting the triwalls off the truck and trailer on to the floor is tricky in itself.  Dad attached a ratchet strap and just pulled them down to the floor and we pushed them into position. Three massive triwalls now in the warehouse full of who knows what. 

The next thing to do is sort through it all.  Now that is a daunting task if there ever was.  This was my first time tackling this sort of job so I started by emptying one triwall into the other two.  I could tell right off the bat that there was a lot of unsalvageable gear in there.  One of the worst things about surplus is that there is a lot of gear damaged beyond repair.  We are currently looking into textile recycling so that we aren't just throwing away all of this stuff.  There has to be something that can be done with all of these textiles besides tossing it all into a landfill.  So the empty triwall is for throwing all the unusable gear into.  It is filling up fast.

Now that I have the one triwall empty my next step is to try to sort though everything. This lot has a bunch of firefighting gear, bright yellow, very easy to distinguish so I started with pulling all of that out that I could. There are also a lot of whites in this lot. Sheets, aprons, chef's whites - shirts and pants, so I put all of that in the same general area. Finally I start getting down to smaller items.  I take the smaller items and fill a tote, once I have a full tote I sit down at the computer and start entering it all into the system so that it is available for you to buy.

I started sorting on Tuesday morning, so far I have almost a full triwall of waste textiles, the second triwall is mostly empty and the third is still overflowing.  Not to mention the firefighting gear that I haven't touched yet and the whites that are just sitting in piles waiting for the next phase of their sorting. I am guessing that I have another 8-10 hours left of sorting and putting things onto the site. Not too bad considering how much there was to begin with!