Bulk bags shipped to Michigan

Who fills bulk bags in Michigan

Beans and beets around Saginaw Bay

The Thumb and the Saginaw Valley grow dry beans, including navy and black beans, and sugar beets. Bean elevators clean, sort and ship the crop, and many fill new food-grade bulk bags for canners and packers.

Beans are dense and smooth, so a baffle bag that holds its shape is a common ask, with a spout bottom for metered discharge. Beet sugar goes in new food-grade bags with a liner. Neither product ever goes in a used bag.

Thumb elevators also handle wheat, corn and soybeans and double as seed and fertilizer dealers, so their orders mix new seed bags for spring with coated fertilizer bags for side-dressing in early summer.

Harvest and campaign season runs through the fall, so bean and sugar plants want their bales in before the first fields come in.

Resin for the molders

Southern Michigan is full of injection molders and plastics shops that make parts for the auto industry and others. Resin comes in by railcar, gaylord and bulk bag; the bags usually need a spout bottom over a hopper, a liner for moisture-sensitive grades, and an SWL matched to the pellet weight.

Molders also make regrind and scrap. Clean, sorted regrind goes to plastics recyclers in bulk bags, and that is a place where a sound once-used bag can do one more job after inspection. A bag that has held a hazardous material does not.

West Michigan, around Grand Rapids, Holland and Zeeland, adds office furniture makers and food plants to the mix. The food side takes flour, sugar and dried fruit ingredients in new lined bags; the furniture side buys powder coatings and foam chemicals under its own safety sheets.

• Virgin resin: spout bottom, liner when the grade asks
• Color concentrate and additives: liner, static type per the site assessment
• Regrind to a recycler: inspected used bags, duffle top

Salt under Detroit

A rock salt mine runs beneath the city of Detroit, and salt from Michigan goes to road crews, water softening and industry across the region. Bagged salt wants coated fabric, a liner and a duffle top, and it is ordered ahead of winter. The mine's underground galleries are wide enough for trucks and loaders to drive inside.

Michigan also quarries limestone, gypsum and sand for cement, wallboard and construction. Stone and sand are heavy, abrasive loads, the kind where a duffle top and a flat or spout bottom do the work and inspected used bags may fit.

Foundries in the state's metal-casting towns use molding sand and binders by the ton, and spent foundry sand leaves in bags too. Spent sand can carry residues, so say what it held when you book empties; a clean molding-sand bag and a waste-sand bag go different places.

Up north and across the Straits

North of Saginaw the plants spread out. Along Lake Huron, a big limestone quarry at Rogers City and cement making around Alpena feed construction across the Great Lakes, mostly by lake freighter. Smaller contractors and landscapers still buy bagged stone and cement-plant byproducts by the truckload.

The Upper Peninsula has iron mining on the Marquette Range and a lot of forest products. A load headed there crosses the Mackinac Bridge on I-75 or comes around through Wisconsin, and either way it is a long haul for a small order. One full trailer beats several LTL trips.

The Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie close for part of the winter, which pauses lake shipping between Lake Superior and the lower lakes. Plants that depend on boat-delivered material sometimes switch to trucks and bags during the closure, so plan that stock in the fall. Ice breakers keep some harbors open longer, but nobody guarantees a sailing date.

Bridges, lakes and frost laws

I-75 runs north from Toledo through Detroit, Flint, Saginaw and Bay City to the Mackinac Bridge and Sault Ste. Marie. I-94 runs west from Detroit through Ann Arbor, Jackson, Battle Creek and Kalamazoo toward Chicago. I-96 links Detroit, Lansing and Grand Rapids with Muskegon, and I-69 runs from Port Huron through Flint and Lansing to Indiana.

Michigan puts seasonal weight limits on many roads during the spring thaw, often called frost laws. A loaded trailer can be restricted on local roads for weeks, so plan spring deliveries to rural plants early and tell us if your dock is off a posted road.

Loads to and from Ontario cross at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit and the Blue Water Bridge in Port Huron. Cross-border shipments need customs paperwork, so tell us up front if the bags cross.