Plastic pallet recycling in Alaska: what the yards hold and where it goes

How Alaska compares

Counting 587 private jobs in warehousing and storage at 30 sites, Alaska stands 49th among the states, 0.03% of the country. The mean site holds 19.6 workers.

The state sits in the Pacific states, a Census division. Its sites average 19.6 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 0.13% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Where the warehousing jobs sit in Alaska

The counties with the most warehousing jobs, from the same BLS count: Anchorage Municipality (525).

• Anchorage Municipality County525 jobs, 89.4% of the Alaska total.

What fills the yards in Alaska

2 further industries are named in the market data for Alaska. Each retires pallets for its own reasons.

• Food manufacturing8,882 private jobs in 2025, 0.5% of the US total. Sanitation audits remove cracked or stained pallets. A change of packaging line retires a colour-coded set. Pallets that held ingredients with strong odours or oils are culled early. Hygienic 48 x 40 and 40 x 48 pallets in HDPE or PP, often with closed decks and colour-coding by zone. Some are listed as food safe but not approved for direct food contact. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.
• Grocery and related product wholesale1,717 private jobs in 2025, 0.2% of the US total. High volume and many inbound shippers. Strays collect at the back of the yard. Sets retire when a retailer changes its pallet standard. Sort marked from unmarked first. Count the unmarked by style. This industry is where the ownership check matters most. In a pile from here, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.

The rest of Alaska's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 8,882. Measured against the national share of employment, food manufacturing is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 2.6 times.

What the size of the state means

Alaska is among the smaller warehouse states, so a pile here may be far from the next one. Say whether the load can be held, whether the pallets are reachable by truck, and how many there are.

Big metros elsewhere in the Pacific states

Against Alaska's 587 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Inland Empire, California (118,368, 201.65 times), Stockton, California (28,518, 48.58 times), Los Angeles, California (27,225, 46.38 times), Seattle, Washington (23,062, 39.29 times), San Francisco, California (9,473, 16.14 times) and Portland, Oregon (8,157, 13.90 times).

Closest to Alaska in warehousing jobs

The table sets the warehousing counts of Montana, Vermont, Hawaii and North Dakota against Alaska.

Loads from the rest of Alaska

Alaska has no metro page yet. A load from anywhere in the state goes the same way: ZIP, count, what the pallets carried, and we say which lane suits it.

Marked pallets in Alaska

No Alaska-specific rule on stray proprietary pallets appears in our sources. Check every pallet for marks first; California's AB 1760 is the one rule we cite.

Describing a Alaska load

For a Alaska pickup: ZIP, count, footprint. From food manufacturing, photograph the deck surface and any staining. From grocery and related product wholesale, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.