The Supply Loop

Rethinking how supply chains move, return, and recover value

Latest stories…

The Stubby, 1961: What Happened When Three Rival Canadian Brewers Agreed to Share One Bottle

Sep 6, 2026

In 1961 the brewers of Canada retired their own bottles and agreed on one squat brown container that any of them could fill. The deposit that brought it back was already decades old. What the agreement added was interchangeability, and by the early 2010s Ontario brewers were filling 1.15 billion bottles a year against 92 million purchased. Germany made the same agreement in 1969 for water bottles, kept its deposit, watched the shared pool erode, and now sits at half its legal reuse target.

Twelve Tires in Gallatin, Missouri: What a 1942 County Rationing Board Can Teach Us About Grading an Installed Base

Aug 30, 2026

In 1942, the United States lost ninety percent of its rubber supply and spent two years making the tires it already owned last until the synthetic plants opened. That effort, run on inspections, certificates and a 35 mile per hour speed limit, is the clearest case on record of recovery buying the time that substitution needed.

Salvage for Victory, 1942: Scrap Harvest Day in Comanche County, Kansas

Aug 16, 2026

On Friday, August 28, 1942, every store, farm and business in Comanche County, Kansas, a stretch of ranch and wheat country on the Oklahoma line, closed for the day so that 4,700 people could go looking for iron. Six weeks later Washington took the same idea national, and by then the country had already run drives for aluminum and for rubber.

Sixty Days: How a 1956 Antitrust Decree Forced IBM Into the Refurbished Computer Business

Aug 9, 2026

In January 1956, a federal judge in New York ordered IBM to sell its machines outright. IBM's business had run entirely on leasing until then. The same order required IBM to hand back any equipment it took in trade to independent dealers within sixty days, at a price no higher than eighty-five percent of a new machine's cost. The case was meant to break IBM's grip on the tabulating machine market. It ended up writing the first rulebook for enterprise equipment recovery, three decades before anyone called it reverse logistics.

Ford Motor Company: The Carmaker That Turned a 1934 Engine Trade-In Into a Remanufacturing Industry

Aug 2, 2026

In 1934, in the fifth year of the Depression, Ford let a car owner replace a worn-out engine by trading it in for a rebuilt one and keeping the car. The condition attached to the lower price was that the old engine stayed behind, which meant Ford's raw material arrived at the counter without a truck, a depot, or a request to anyone.