Service 04 — Recycling

Pallet recycling that ends with a product, not a hole in the ground.

Recycling a pallet is not one process. It is a decision tree run four hundred times an hour by people with a hammer and a good eye, and the quality of that decision is the whole business.

Warehouse aisle lined on both sides with tall stacks of used wood pallets on a polished concrete floor, roof lights overhead — Inside the buildingThe sort aisle at half past seven. Graded stock on the left, waiting to be worked on the right.

Talk to us about a recycling program

Give us the quantity, the size and the ZIP. You'll get a written quote with the grade, the freight and the pickup window — not a sales call.

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

First name *

Last name *

Email *

We reply by email, so this needs to be a working address.

Phone *

US or Canadian 10-digit number. Formats itself as you type.

Company

City

State / Province

Two-letter code or full name.

Postal code *

US ZIP (43217) or Canadian postal code (K1A 0B1).

Select service *

Product type *

Quantity *

Whole units, digits only.

Grade

Message

No phone number required from us — we quote by email so you have the numbers in writing.

Warehouse interior with pallets sorted by type — natural wood, blue pooled units, black plastic and EPAL stamped stacks

Segregation

Sorted by type, not by convenience. Pooled units go back to the pool; plastic runs a separate stream entirely.

The decision tree

Four outcomes, decided one pallet at a time.

There is no machine that can make this call reliably. Every unit passes a grader who has done it long enough to hear a cracked stringer.

Step 01
Reuse
Sound deck, sound stringers, correct footprint, dry. Cleaned, banded, graded and back on a trailer. Roughly 34% of intake goes straight out again.
The cheapest possible outcome, environmentally and financially.
Step 02
Repair
One or two broken boards, or a stringer that can take a companion. Broken parts come off, recovered boards go on, and the unit re-enters at the grade it now genuinely meets.
Repaired with salvaged lumber wherever the spec allows.
Step 03
Dismantle
Beyond economic repair as a unit, but full of good wood. A dismantler pulls it apart; the boards become repair stock and the stringers get cut down for shorter builds.
This is where most of our repair lumber comes from.
Step 04
Grind
Wet, mouldy, splintered or too small to save. Ground, screened and magnetically de-nailed into landscape mulch, animal bedding and boiler fibre.
Still a product. Still not a landfill.

What we cannot recycle

The 0.6%, and why we publish it.

Some wood should not be reused or ground. Pallets that carried a chemical spill, pallets treated with methyl bromide, painted or pressure-treated units, and anything visibly contaminated with oil or biological waste go to a permitted disposal facility rather than into a mulch stream that ends up on somebody's flower bed.

It would be easy to leave that number out of our marketing. We publish it because a company claiming 100% diversion is either not handling difficult material or is not being straight with you.

Methyl bromide (MB-stamped) treated wood
Painted, stained or pressure-treated lumber
Chemical, oil or biologically contaminated units
Composite and moulded units with non-wood binders we cannot separate

The outputs

What comes out of the yard

Percentages are by weight across calendar-year 2025 intake at the Columbus yard.
Output	Share of intake	Where it goes
Graded pallets, reused as-is	34%	Back to distribution customers across six states
Repaired pallets	24%	Resold as Grade A and B recycled stock
Recovered lumber	27%	Repair stock, remanufactured pallets, crates and skids
Coloured and dyed mulch	9%	Landscape suppliers and municipal contracts
Animal bedding and boiler fibre	5%	Agricultural buyers and industrial boilers
Ferrous scrap	0.4%	Scrap metal processors
Landfilled	0.6%	Permitted disposal — treated and contaminated wood only

Why it matters more than it sounds

A pallet is a carbon store with a job

Wood is roughly half carbon by dry weight. A 45-pound recycled hardwood pallet is holding something like 10 kilograms of carbon that came out of the atmosphere while the tree was standing. Burn it or bury it and that story ends; keep it in service for another eight cycles and the carbon stays put while doing useful work.

That is why reuse beats recycling and recycling beats energy recovery, in that order, every time. The hierarchy is not sentimental — it follows directly from where the embodied energy sits. Our full arithmetic, with the coefficients and their sources, is on the carbon methodology page.

If you want to see the mechanics of the yard rather than the philosophy, the recycling process walkthrough follows a single trailer from the gate to the outbound dock.

Questions

Recycling questions

Do you charge for recycling, or pay for it?

It depends entirely on what is in the load. Sellable cores are a purchase; broken and mixed material is a removal fee, usually $95 to $180 per trailer in central Ohio. A mixed load often nets out close to zero.

Can you handle heat-treated and export pallets?

Yes. Heat treatment is just heat — the wood is unchanged and recycles normally. Methyl bromide treatment is different and that material is segregated. See ISPM-15 explained.

How do I prove diversion to an auditor?

Weight tickets per collection plus a monthly diversion statement showing tonnage in and tonnage by outcome. That is the level of evidence a GRI 306 disclosure actually needs.

What happens to the nails?

Magnetically separated at the grinder and sold as ferrous scrap. About 0.4% of intake weight, which sounds trivial until you consider it is roughly 160 tons a year across the industry in a city this size.

Reporting

What you get, and which framework it satisfies

Diversion claims fall apart under audit when the only evidence is an invoice. These are the documents we produce and what each one is actually good for.

Document	Frequency	Contains	Satisfies
Collection count ticket	Every pickup	Units by type, signed by both parties	Internal reconciliation, dispute resolution
Weight ticket	Every inbound load	Gross, tare, net weight from our scale	The primary record for any tonnage claim
Monthly diversion statement	Monthly	Tonnage in, tonnage by outcome, landfill tonnage, variance	GRI 306, corporate zero-waste targets
Disposal documentation	As required	Facility and tonnage for permitted disposal	Regulatory and audit trails
Pallet Passport	Per shipment	Provenance, grade, reuse and repair shares	Supplier scorecards, customer evidence
Annual summary	Yearly	Twelve-month roll-up with year-on-year comparison	Annual reporting cycles

Contamination

What to keep out of the stream, and why

The 0.6% we cannot divert is almost entirely material that arrived contaminated. Keeping these out of the collection improves your diversion figure and ours.

01Methyl-bromide stamped unitsLook for MB in the treatment code on the IPPC mark. We exclude this material entirely, regardless of condition — the stamp decoder shows you exactly where to look.
02Pressure-treated and painted lumberGreen or brown treated timber and anything painted. It has no business in a landscape mulch stream and we will not put it there.
03Chemically contaminated palletsAnything that carried a spill, or that has staining or an odour you cannot account for. Segregate it and tell us — we will route it to permitted disposal rather than pretending.
04Composite and presswood unitsMoulded and pressed units with non-wood binders that cannot be separated from the fibre. Small volumes, but they contaminate a grind.
05General waste in the pileFilm, banding, strapping and cardboard mixed into a pallet stack. Ferrous banding we handle magnetically; film and cardboard we do not, and they slow the whole line.

Yard throughput

What the operation handles

6,400

Pallets received a day

Across roughly 19 inbound trailers.

2.5 sec

Per grading decision

Four-way judgement, by hand, all day.

4 hrs

Gate to gate

Typical load, received before the 1:00 PM cut-off.

1 in 640

Mis-grade rate

Found by our own 2% outbound re-check.

Questions

Recycling is a supply chain, not a skip.

Set up a program and you get the collection, the reporting and, in most cases, a supply of graded stock coming back the other way.

Walk through the process Our circular model

Keep reading

Pallet Recycling is delivered from our yard at 7240 S Access Rd, Columbus, OH 43217, Monday to Friday 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM and Saturday mornings.