Illinois Boxes Recycle started by accident in 2014, in a borrowed corner of someone else's warehouse. The decade that followed turned an unlikely side project into the Midwest's most stubbornly hands-on gaylord refinery. Here's the full timeline.
Founder Eli Markovic was running a fulfillment side gig out of a friend's auto-parts warehouse in southern Rockford. He kept watching pallets of perfectly usable gaylord boxes get tossed every Friday. He started stacking them in his corner of the building 'just to see what happens.' Within three months, a body shop across town was buying every box he could keep.
What started as 'I have some boxes' became a Saturday-morning ritual: weigh in, grade, restack. The clipboard turned into a Google Sheet. The Google Sheet turned into a real ledger. A second body shop joined. Then a polymer compounder. Then a metal-stamping plant.
We moved into our own bay — 8,000 square feet on Falcon Road. A dispatcher named Donna came aboard from a regional freight company and put discipline on the routes. She still runs the dispatch board today.
We hit a tipping point: more boxes were arriving with bent flaps, torn liners, or smashed bottoms than we could resell as-is. Instead of recycling them all, we built a reconditioning bench. Six months later it was four benches. A year later it was a real line with a tape applicator and a custom flap-flattener.
When personal protective equipment supply chains imploded, a Chicago glove maker called us looking for 4,000 gaylords a week. We rerouted half the yard to support them through the worst of it. By the end of 2020 we'd handled more box volume than the previous three years combined.
We took over the rest of the Falcon Road building and the adjacent paved yard. Capacity tripled. We added octagonal stock, triple-wall, and a small custom-cut station.
Today we serve a routed footprint across Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, and Michigan, plus shipped orders for buyers nationwide. The clipboard is gone — but Donna still keeps a printed copy of the dispatch board pinned to the wall.
We don't have a roadmap that ends with an IPO. The next ten years look a lot like the last ten: more grading benches, more truck routes, slightly better software, a steady push toward same-day pickup in a wider radius. The North Star — never let a usable box become a recycle bale — doesn't change.
If you want to be part of it as a seller, a buyer, or eventually a teammate — there's a form on every page of this site. Including this one.