1 September 2026 · Market · 5 min
Q3 note: the yield problem did not go away
We flagged a falling straight-to-reuse yield at the half year and said two quarters was not enough data. It is now three.
Read itThe Yard Journal · 57 posts
Writing from the sort deck.
Market notes, specification arguments, yard operations and the occasional year-end account of what we got wrong. Written by the people who grade the pallets, published since 2023, and never gated.
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- Written quotes, usually inside one business day
- Loads from 100 pallets to full 53' trailers
- We buy as readily as we sell — tell us which way it flows
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Sorted by type, not by convenience. Pooled units go back to the pool; plastic runs a separate stream entirely.
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Seven kinds of post.
Roughly: what the market is doing, how to specify things properly, what happens in the yard, and the numbers we publish about ourselves.
2026
11 posts
- 1 September 2026Q3 note: the yield problem did not go awayWe flagged a falling straight-to-reuse yield at the half year and said two quarters was not enough data. It is now three.Market5 min
- 18 August 2026What a pallet actually costs you over ten yearsThe purchase price is somewhere between a third and a tenth of the total, and the rest is decisions you make after the invoice is paid.How-to7 min
- 14 July 2026Mid-year: the used pallet market at the halfway pointCore supply has been unusually tight since March, the spring peak arrived early and stayed, and repair volumes are at a record share of output.Market6 min
- 16 June 2026Summer storage: keeping a stack dry for eight weeksEveryone assumes winter is the problem. A humid Ohio July does more damage to an outdoor pallet stack than a cold January does.How-to5 min
- 19 May 2026Seventeen years of grading: what has changed and what has notThe equipment is better, the paperwork is unrecognisable, and the core judgement is exactly the same operation it was in 2009.People7 min
- 28 April 2026We built a load planner because the arithmetic annoyed usEvery pallet calculator online multiplies two numbers and stops. That is not how anybody actually loads a trailer.Yard notes5 min
- 14 April 2026Reading a pallet quote: eight questions that make two prices comparableTwo quotes for the same thing can be twenty per cent apart and both be honest. Here is how to find out which one you are actually looking at.How-to6 min
- 17 March 2026Racking incidents and the pallets underneath themWhen a load comes out of a rack, the pallet is rarely the only cause and frequently the last thing anyone examines.Standards7 min
- 17 February 2026Plastic came back into the conversation. Here is our honest read.We are a wood company being asked about plastic more often than at any point in the last five years. The reasons are real and the answer has not changed much.Market7 min
- 3 February 2026We published a page for every state, including the ones we cannot serveFifty states, three hundred and one cities, and a service tier on each that is occasionally 'you should buy from somebody else'.Yard notes5 min
- 20 January 2026What a softwood tariff does to a used pallet yardTrade measures on lumber do not touch our raw material at all, and they still move our prices — through substitution, with a lag of about two quarters.Market7 min
2025
15 posts
- 9 December 2025Year in the yard: 2025, and the 99.4%The diversion rate reached 99.4%, the April shortfall did not repeat, and the reconciliation variance came back under control. One thing went badly.Yard notes6 min
- 18 November 2025The Pallet Passport, three years onWe built a per-load traceability document in 2022 expecting it to be a niche request. It is now the thing new customers mention first.Sustainability6 min
- 21 October 2025Buying pallets when you have no idea what you needA short guide for the person who has just been handed responsibility for pallets and does not want to admit they have never thought about them.How-to6 min
- 7 October 2025What a 3PL should ask a pallet supplierThird-party warehouses have a harder pallet problem than anyone else, because the fleet belongs to somebody who is not in the room.How-to7 min
- 16 September 2025Where our cores come from, and why the radius mattersOur median collection radius is 78 miles. That number does more work in our carbon arithmetic than anything else we do.Sustainability6 min
- 19 August 2025Overhang: the one inch that costs thirty per cent of your stack strengthProduct hanging over the pallet edge is the most common packaging failure we see, and the loss is far larger than the overhang looks.How-to6 min
- 29 July 2025The four-way notch is a compromise nobody voted forCutting a notch into a beam at the point where it carries the most load is not obviously a good idea. Here is why we all do it anyway.Standards6 min
- 15 July 2025Heat treatment on site: what the chamber actually doesFifty-six degrees at the core for thirty continuous minutes, verified by probes in the coldest part of the load. Everything else is logistics.Standards6 min
- 17 June 2025Block pallets are quietly winning in North AmericaStringer pallets still dominate by volume, but every category where handling has become more automated has moved toward blocks, and that is not reversing.Market7 min
- 13 May 2025The 0.6%: what we cannot recycle, and why we publish itFour categories of wood that should not go into a mulch stream, roughly 125 tons a year, and an argument about why a claimed 100% should worry you.Sustainability6 min
- 15 April 2025How we train a graderEight months, starting on the repair bench, and two of those months spent having your decisions overruled by somebody with nine years in.People6 min
- 18 March 2025Repair or replace: the arithmetic, workedThere is a defensible number at which repairing a pallet stops making sense, and most operations are nowhere near it in either direction.How-to7 min
- 4 March 2025Half a million nails: a year at the magnetThe smallest stream in the yard, followed for twelve months, and what it says about the rest of the operation.Yard notes5 min
- 18 February 2025Half pallets, quarter pallets and the retail floorIn every other application a pallet is invisible. On a shop floor it is a fixture, and the specification changes accordingly.Logistics6 min
- 21 January 2025Pallet pooling in 2025: what has actually changedPooling is not the binary choice it was fifteen years ago, and the hybrid arrangement most operations end up with is now the default rather than the exception.Market7 min
2024
16 posts
- 10 December 2024Year in the yard: 2024 by the scaleThroughput, diversion, the second grinder, the things that went well and the two that did not.Yard notes6 min
- 26 November 2024Wood is a carbon store. Here is the arithmetic.Half the dry weight of a pallet is carbon that used to be in the atmosphere. What happens to it next is the whole argument.Sustainability7 min
- 12 November 2024Cold chain: what freezing does to woodA pallet that goes into a freezer wet stays wet for the rest of its life, and moisture readings taken cold are misleading in a specific and predictable direction.Standards6 min
- 15 October 2024Why we turned down a 40,000-unit orderIt would have been the largest single order in the company's history, and taking it would have meant shorting eleven customers who booked in the autumn.People5 min
- 10 September 2024Automation is changing what a pallet has to beFor sixty years a pallet had to survive a forklift driver. Increasingly it has to satisfy a machine, and machines have opinions about millimetres.Standards7 min
- 27 August 2024Reading a rack: what pallet damage tells you about your operationDamaged pallets are data. Where the breaks are tells you which forklift, which lane, or which racking configuration is causing them.How-to7 min
- 13 August 2024The economics of the companion stringerA repair that costs three dollars, saves a nine dollar pallet, and drops it a grade. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on where the pallet is going.Yard notes6 min
- 16 July 2024Dyed mulch: what is actually in the colourColoured mulch has a reputation problem it mostly does not deserve, and a real risk that has nothing to do with the pigment.Sustainability6 min
- 11 June 2024Measuring your loss rate in one month, with a clipboardThe single most useful number in pallet management is the one almost nobody has, and it takes four weeks and no software to get it.How-to6 min
- 28 May 2024Pallet theft is real, and nobody talks about itWhen cores are worth five dollars a unit, a trailer of them is worth two thousand, and it is sitting outside behind a fence.Market6 min
- 14 May 2024ISPM-15: five shipments we watched get held, and whyEvery one of these was avoidable, four of them were administrative rather than material, and one was a repair made by a yard that was not tracking treatment.Standards8 min
- 9 April 2024Spring, and the eight weeks when everyone wants palletsA view from the sort deck during the tightest stretch of the year, and what it looks like when four industries all need the same rectangle at once.Market5 min
- 12 March 2024Species matters more than you think: oak, poplar and SPFTwo pallets with identical dimensions and identical board counts can differ by forty per cent in what they will carry, purely because of what tree they came from.Standards7 min
- 20 February 2024The emergency purchase: the most expensive pallet you will ever buyAt most sites, Friday-afternoon spot buying is the single largest avoidable line in the pallet budget, and it never appears as its own line.How-to6 min
- 6 February 2024Why we do not have a phone numberIt is the most commented-on thing about this company, it costs us business occasionally, and we are not changing it.People5 min
- 16 January 2024Lumber prices came down. Used pallet prices did not. Here is why.Every time the lumber market falls, someone asks why their recycled pallet quote has not moved. The answer is that the two markets are only loosely connected.Market7 min
2023
15 posts
- 5 December 2023What we learned from weighing everything for a yearWe switched from counting units to weighing streams, and three assumptions we had held for years turned out to be wrong.Sustainability7 min
- 28 November 2023Buying pallets in a downturnPallet supply gets easier and pallet quality gets worse at exactly the same time, and the second half surprises people.Market6 min
- 14 November 2023A short history of 48 by 40The most consequential rectangle in American logistics was chosen to fit a truck, and everything else in the supply chain arranged itself around that decision.Standards6 min
- 24 October 2023Fire code and the pallet pile behind your dockIdle pallet storage is specifically regulated, and the wall of empties against your building is the thing an inspector will find first.Logistics6 min
- 19 September 2023How a pallet fails in a rack (and why it rarely fails on the floor)Racked capacity is about a third of static capacity, for a reason that comes straight out of beam theory and explains most pallet incidents.Standards7 min
- 5 September 2023The forklift is the most expensive thing that touches your palletsTwo minutes of forklift time costs more than a dollar fifty. Count the touches and the pallet price stops looking like the main event.How-to6 min
- 15 August 2023The case against your custom footprintWe build custom pallets. We also talk about two customers out of three out of ordering one, and here is the argument we use.How-to8 min
- 25 July 2023Nine hundred nails: what we recover from a single trailerFasteners are 0.4% of everything that enters this yard by weight. It sounds like a rounding error until you multiply it by a year.Sustainability5 min
- 27 June 2023Slip sheets, and why almost nobody uses themA sheet of fibreboard weighs two pounds, costs a dollar and does most of a pallet's job. The reason they never took over is worth understanding.Logistics6 min
- 13 June 2023Moisture content, and why a wet pallet is a different productNineteen per cent is the number that separates a pallet you can sell from one you cannot, and almost nobody outside the trade knows it exists.Standards7 min
- 9 May 2023The trailer is full of air: why pallet freight is priced the way it isA full trailer of pallets weighs about a third of what the trailer can legally carry. That single fact explains almost everything about pallet economics.Logistics6 min
- 18 April 2023What actually happens to a broken deck boardFollow one snapped board from the moment it comes off the pallet to the moment its wood leaves the yard as something else entirely.Yard notes6 min
- 21 March 2023Reading a pallet: the four things a grader checks in three secondsGrading looks casual from the far side of the sort deck. It is a fixed four-step sequence, run four hundred times an hour, and you can learn it.How-to7 min
- 14 February 2023Why the pallet you buy in March costs more than the one you buy in JanuaryPallet pricing has a seasonal shape that almost nobody buys around, and the gap between the cheap month and the expensive one is routinely 30%.Market6 min
- 24 January 2023What a pallet is actually made ofTwelve pieces of wood and eighty-four nails, and almost every argument in this trade is about one of them.Standards6 min