IBC tote recycling in Ashburn, Virginia

A cooling plant’s tote list

A data center rejects heat through chillers and cooling towers, and the water in them needs treatment. A Xylem case study describes a hyperscale data center where intermittent biocide dosing, every 13 weeks being typical, together with continuous UV disinfection, used 75% less biocide. Fewer doses mean fewer biocide totes, but the totes that do arrive are the kind with an SDS, a hazard label and a short list of what could be in them.

Glycol totes are the other regular. Facilities teams and their water-treatment contractors move them in a few at a time, so a request from Ashburn is more likely to be a small, well-documented batch than a yard full.

What to check at the dock

1. Read the label and match it to the SDS before touching the valve.
2. Measure the heel with a clean rod through the fill cap.
3. Note the capacity: 275 or 330 gallons.
4. Keep biocide totes apart from glycol totes; they go different ways.

The data-center cooling page lists the usual last contents and grades, and the Empty Check turns the heel into a verdict.

Getting to Ashburn

Ashburn sits on the Dulles Greenway (Route 267) and Route 7, which run east to Sterling and Dulles Airport and west to Leesburg. The county has about 233 data center buildings, with more than 10 million square feet permitted in 2025 alone.

The Loudoun County page covers the rest of the county, and Sterling is the next stop east on Route 7.

What the water treatment literature says

Trade writing on cooling-water treatment for data centers, such as the Consulting-Specifying Engineer article we list, describes treating cooling water for corrosion, scale and biological growth. That is a general account of the discipline, not a record of any Ashburn plant, and we cite it only to show why the chemicals are bought.

The practical consequence for this page is that the three most common last-contents answers from an Ashburn site are inhibitor, biocide and glycol, and that each has its own grading path.

Small batches from big buildings

A hyperscale building can have a very large mechanical plant and still empty only a handful of totes at a time, because the dosing is metered. That is a reason to write even if the count is small. A request for three empties is as welcome as one for thirty.

Reading the label on a cooling-plant tote

The safety data sheet has sixteen sections, and two decide most of what we need: the product identification in section 1 and the hazards in section 2. Match the product name on the tote’s label to the name on the sheet before anything else, because water-treatment suppliers sell similar-looking totes with different contents.

Brenntag and Univar both list totes among the packaged options they supply to data centers, so a facility may buy the same product in several sizes. Say which size the empties are.

Scale in Loudoun

The county’s 233 data center buildings cover about 56.5 million square feet, an average of around 240,000 square feet each. A building that size runs a cooling plant with its own chemical program.

That is the reason this page exists. It is not a count of totes, and no operator’s volumes are claimed.

A short list for a first request

Give the product name from the label, the supplier, the tote size, the number of totes, the heel in inches, the ZIP code and the access: dock, forklift or ground level. If the totes held a biocide, say so in the first line, because a biocide tote and a glycol tote go different ways and the answer depends on which you have.

Glycol, inhibitor and biocide compared

Glycol is a coolant base, usually ethylene or propylene, and it is the least hazardous of the three to handle. A corrosion inhibitor protects metal pipe from the water that flows through it. A biocide kills the organisms that foul a cooling tower. Each has its own label hazard, its own storage rule and its own set of buyers, so a tote of any of them should be listed separately. Never combine two products in one description, and never assume that two blue totes held the same thing.

Timing a request

Cooling plants are serviced on a maintenance calendar, so empties tend to appear together after a dosing cycle. Mention the date of the last service and whether more empties are expected.

Asking from Ashburn

Ashburn ZIP codes are 20147 and 20166. Say which one the site is in, how many totes there are and how they can be reached.