Fred Lee wanted a cardboard tube as a coffin, made in his own factory. His grandson Bernard Lee has his own venture that reconditions industrial containers, writes Basil Miller

Industrial Packaging in Bray, Co Wicklow, is a substantial family SME, with a trading history going back to the 1940s and around 50 people on the payroll. Bernard Lee isn’t in the family business, though his Packaging Laundry is engaged in activity related to the family firm.

Bernard Lee is the third generation of the family involved in the industrial packaging sector. His father Norman Lee’s enterprise, Industrial Packaging Ltd, has been trading since 1947 and had a net worth of €9.5m in April 2021

Fred Lee, the founder of Industrial Packaging, was born in 1921 and died in 2016. The tribute published on the company website related that Fred spent his childhood in India, where his father managed a coffee plantation. When his father died, the family returned to Dublin, and Fred's mother’s multiple jobs included playing piano for silent movies.

Fred Lee was dispatched to a London charity school for sons of war victims, and signed up for the Royal Navy in 1941. His wartime experience spanned escorting Atlantic convoys to mine-sweeping in India. After the war and back in Dublin, Fred and his father-in-law started a laundry business for hotels and nursing homes.

That led into buying an ailing packaging business that made cardboard tubes and cans, which was renamed Industrial Packaging. The original factory was at Harmony Row in central Dublin and relocated firstly to Blackrock and later to its bespoke manufacturing plant in Bray.

In Association with

With six sons and six daughters, Fred Lee and his wife Patricia had plenty of incentive to grow the family business, which pays out c.€1m per annum in dividends to shareholders.

Bernard Lee was 27-years-old when he established Packaging Laundry. The ‘laundry’ part of the company name references his grandfather’s first business but it also reflects what the business does.

Packaging Laundry’s focus is to recondition and recycle Intermediate Bulk Containers (IBCs) that are used to transport industrial goods.

After school, Bernard Lee headed for Australia where he worked as a tiler. Back in Ireland in 2016, he was aware that there had been a discussion in the family firm about extending into cleaning and reconditioning industrial containers.

Industrial Packaging decided to stick with the core business, and Bernard grabbed that ball and ran with it.

Closed loop

Before Packaging Laundry came into existence, used containers were shipped to the UK or simply scrapped. Reconditioning is good for the environment and supports the notion of closed-loop or circular manufacturing, where ‘waste’ from the industrial process is reused.

According to Lee, Packaging Laundry has almost doubled volume each year since trading commenced, with 12,500 IBCs processed in 2021 as well as a smaller number of drums and barrels.

Most IBCs can be reconditioned for resale, while damaged containers are recycled. Lee’s operation reduces the plastic element of recycled IBCs to tiny pellets in a grinding machine, ready for remanufacture, with the metal parts going to recycling plants.

“We identified a gap in the market for a specialist IBC and drum reconditioner,” Lee explains. “Our mission is to mitigate the export of contaminated waste packaging and enable the potential for a circular economy in industrial containers.

“We are licensed by the EPA to accept up to 1,650 tonnes of waste packaging annually, both IBCs and drums that contained either hazardous or non-hazardous material. Once they arrive at our site, they go through a seven-stage reconditioning process. The end result is high quality, reconditioned containers, ready to be sold back into the Irish market rather than exported.”

Packaging Laundry is owned equally by Norman Lee and his father Bernard Lee. Fixed assets investment has been substantial, and expanded by €680,000 in the year to April 2021, according to abridged financial statements.

Period-end liabilities were €690,000 and the company booked a net profit of €150,000, the same as the year before.

Bernard Lee wouldn’t reveal much in the way of commercial detail, beyond noting that he sells the reconditioned IBCs at around 50% of the cost of a new one, while a ‘rebottled’ IBC will cost c.20% less than a new one.

An IBC is a metal cage holding a plastic ‘bottle’, the standard size being one cubic metre or 1,000 litres. Sometimes the cage is fine for reuse while the bottle isn’t, hence the term ‘rebottling’.

Packaging Laundry’s inbound supply chain is mostly free. Some suppliers pay for collection of their IBCs where the cost of removing and disposing of the hazardous content is prohibitive.

Space constraint

Bernard Lee says his main trading constraint is space. Despite expanding his warehouse sideways, he can’t take any more containers. Lee is looking for a larger site, and he believes that if he finds the space he can expand his business at pace over the next few years.

There’s a largely vacant IDA site in Greystones a few kilometres away from the Packaging Laundry location at Oldcourt Business Park. Lee and a similarly constrained firm approached IDA Ireland about moving there, to build a facility both could use.

“We were told it would cost us €550,000 per acre and we would need two to three acres. Is that assistance for small firms? There is also a third company across from us that is desperate to move due to lack of space. Between the three of us, there could be up to ten 40-foot trucks coming down the Boghall Road daily if we could expand our facilities.”

Bernard Lee brushes away questions about Industrial Packaging, stressing his non-involvement.

As for founder Fred, Bernard recalls that his grandfather caused quite a stir locally as the first and likely only man ever to be buried in a 650mm diameter cardboard tube, usually used to cast concrete columns.

Although Fred Lee had mused about using cardboard tubes to bury people, so that they could be interred vertically and face in any direction, he was laid to rest in a horizontal position beside his previously deceased wife, Patricia.