Industrial Storage Container Calculator

A single-page calculator for two families of industrial storage container — Euro stacking containers (Euroboxes) and attached-lid containers (ALCs) — that answers both halves of a purchasing question.

The trade has no agreed vocabulary for either family, so the tool lists the aliases under each heading: euro crate, Eurocontainer, stacking tote, straight-wall tote, industrial tote, KLC, Eurobehälter, bac gerbable for the first; attached top container (ATC), distribution tote, hinged-lid crate, crocodile-lid box, "Hudson box" for the second. Which of those are evidenced by real listings and which two actively mislead is set out in the dataset's naming guidance.

It answers:

• How much will it hold, and how much space will it take? Usable capacity, external volume, Euro pallet loads with per-layer diagrams, 20 ft container (TEU) utilisation, and the volume of the same boxes stored empty and nested.
• Which purchase is better value? Price up two or more baskets and rank them on volume price — what one usable litre costs to buy.

Live: https://danielrosehill.github.io/storage-container-calculator/ · also served at https://blog.danielrosehill.com/tools/eurobox-calculator/

Volume price

Purchase price ÷ usable capacity, quoted per usable litre with the same figure per m³ alongside. Lower is better.

There is no industry-standard term for this — freight quotes per m³, supermarkets call it unit pricing, container makers quote per box — so the name is this tool's own. Litres are the primary scale because every container on the market lands between roughly 0.10 and 10 per litre, which reads better than four-digit per-m³ figures.

The metric is deliberately built on usable capacity, not external L × W × H. Comparing on external volume flatters a tapered ALC against a straight-walled Eurobox of the same nominal size, which is exactly the error the tool exists to prevent. Worked example (the Eurobox price is a real Israeli retail figure, the ALC price is illustrative):

Basket	Usable	Total	Volume price
20 × ALC 60 × 40 × 31 @ ₪150	1,120 L	₪3,000	₪2.68 / L
60 × Euro 60 × 40 × 34 @ ₪153	3,810 L	₪9,180	₪2.41 / L

The Eurobox buys volume 10 % more cheaply. The ALC's case is elsewhere: its price includes a lid, and those 20 boxes collapse to 0.43 m³ when empty against the Eurobox's 4.90 m³.

Are ALCs Euroboxes?

No — which is why the tool is no longer called the Eurobox calculator. They share the 600 × 400 and 400 × 300 footprints and palletise identically, but they are a distinct product: sloping walls, an integral hinged lid, their own height grid, and they nest ~75 % when empty where a straight-walled Eurobox does not nest at all. The catalogue keeps them as separate families throughout, colour-coded blue for Euro and amber for ALC down to the pallet layer diagrams.

The repository keeps its old name so the GitHub Pages URL and the blog copy do not break.

What it computes

• Usable capacity in litres, and its ratio to external volume ("space efficiency")
• External volume in m³ — the space the boxes occupy when full
• Empty, nested volume — the storage and return-leg figure, where ALCs win
• Euro pallet loads (EUR-1 or EUR-6 half pallet) at a selectable max stack height, with per-layer layout diagrams
• 20 ft container (TEU) utilisation by volume and by pallet floor positions
• A4 PDF report via "Save as PDF" (browser print-to-PDF, print stylesheet)
• 3D models of the same units — view in the browser, download the GLB, or load a size straight into the calculation

Quantities, prices and settings persist in localStorage, so a supplier's price list survives a reload.

Catalogue

Family	Footprints	Heights (mm)
Euro stacking	600 × 400	120, 150, 170, 175, 200, 220, 230, 240, 270, 280, 300, 310, 320, 340, 365, 400, 420, 465
	400 × 300	120, 150, 170, 200, 220, 230, 240, 270, 320
	300 × 200	120, 150, 170, 220
	800 × 600	220, 320, 420
ALC	600 × 400	250, 310, 367, 400
	400 × 300	222, 264, 306

41 catalogue sizes. The Euro height series is not defined by any standard — unlike the three VDA KLT heights, it is whatever manufacturers converged on, so these are the sizes observed for sale rather than a specification.

Plus custom dimensions, which pick their capacity estimate from a straight-walled or tapered wall style. Custom sizes also appear in the comparison dropdown, so a size the catalogue does not list can still be priced against one that it does.

Every capacity figure, its source and its confidence level is in docs/container-reference-data.md — including which numbers are geometrically derived, which are vendor nominal figures, and the one known outlier. Catalogue capacities are typical and vary by manufacturer; check the supplier's own internal dimensions before committing to a large order.

The same reference data is published as a machine-readable dataset, extended with the VDA 4500 KLT sizes, standards-conformance fields, and 121 individual vendor listings from four markets: danielrosehill/storage-container-dimensions on Hugging Face (CC BY 4.0), with an 8-page printable version of the whole catalogue — sizes, internal dimensions, capacities and the vendor spread, by family — at reference/storage-container-reference.pdf.

Every row there also carries vendor_capacity_low_l and vendor_capacity_high_l — the range of capacities implied by each vendor's own published internal dimensions, which on a 60 × 40 × 32 box spans 60 to 66 litres. This calculator uses the low end.

3D models

The "3D models" section renders the GLBs from storage-box-3d-models with Google's <model-viewer>. Each card offers a GLB download and, for the container sizes, an "Add to calculation" button — it fills the matching catalogue tile when the calculator already lists that size and family, and a custom row when it does not.

Two deliberate choices:

• Assets are loaded from absolute URLs (https://blog.danielrosehill.com/models/storage-boxes/) rather than relative paths, so this one index.html works identically from GitHub Pages, from the blog copy, and inside the Android WebView without a build step to rewrite paths. The blog sends Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * on /models/, which <model-viewer> requires cross-origin.
• <model-viewer> and the GLBs load on demand, not on page load. The script (~1 MB) is fetched from a CDN the first time someone presses "View in 3D", and each GLB only when its own card is opened. The preview JPEG stands in until then. Consequence: with no network the section shows the posters and the button reports "3D unavailable offline".

The model set and the calculator's height catalogue are different grids — only the 600 × 400 × 230 Eurobox is a size the calculator already lists. That is why "Add to calculation" falls back to a custom row rather than assuming a tile exists.

Assumptions

• Single-SKU pallets (box types are not mixed on one pallet) — counts are conservative planning estimates, not a packing optimisation
• Boxes are stacked in aligned grid layers with no overhang
• EUR-1 pallet: 1200 × 800 × 144 mm; 11 per 20 ft container floor
• 20 ft container internal volume: 33.2 m³
• ALCs nest to 75 % of their height when empty; Euro stacking containers do not nest
• Volume price excludes freight, duty, and separately bought lids

Stack

Plain HTML/CSS/JS, no build step, no dependencies. Hosted on GitHub Pages.