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

How Arizona compares

Counting 52,054 private jobs in warehousing and storage at 345 sites, Arizona stands 13th among the states, 2.74% of the country. The mean site holds 150.9 workers.

The state sits in the Mountain states, a Census division. Its sites average 150.9 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 1.48% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Where the warehousing jobs sit in Arizona

The counties with the most warehousing jobs, from the same BLS count: Maricopa (42,291), Pima (8,731) and Santa Cruz (572).

• Maricopa County42,291 jobs, 81.2% of the Arizona total.
• Pima County8,731 jobs, 16.8% of the Arizona total.
• Santa Cruz County572 jobs, 1.1% of the Arizona total.

What fills the yards in Arizona

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

• Warehousing and storage52,054 private jobs in 2025, 2.7% of the US total. Forklift tines split decks and chip corners. A racking change retires one style at once. Strays arrive on inbound trailers from shippers who use pooled pallets, and sit in the yard until someone asks whose they are. General-purpose 48 x 40 pallets, nestables for empty storage and rackables on beams. Warehouses hold the widest mix of styles of any industry here, so mixed resin and mixed colour piles are normal. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Food manufacturing15,944 private jobs in 2025, 0.9% 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. Say what the pallets carried. A load that touched edible oil is a different bin from a load that sat under sealed cartons. FDA does not approve pallet models, and recycled regrind is not made for food contact. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.

The rest of Arizona's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 15,944, pharmaceutical manufacturing 4,977 and auto parts 2,392. Measured against the national share of employment, warehousing and storage is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 1.3 times.

Cold storage in Arizona

USDA counted 4 million cubic feet of gross refrigerated warehouse space in Arizona on October 1, 2025, 36th of 36 states. Cold stores wear pallets differently, and the refrigerated warehousing page says how.

What the size of the state means

Arizona is a mid-table warehouse state. The jobs sit in a few places, and a pile outside them is the exception. Give the ZIP early, because distance to the nearest cluster decides how a load is placed.

Big metros elsewhere in the Mountain states

Against Arizona's 52,054 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Las Vegas, Nevada (28,250, 0.54 times), Denver, Colorado (15,858, 0.30 times), Reno, Nevada (12,269, 0.24 times) and Salt Lake City, Utah (6,623, 0.13 times).

Next to Arizona

The table sets the warehousing counts of California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah against Arizona.

Metros we cover in Arizona

Phoenix each have a page with ZIPs, counties and a corridor note.

• Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler42,340 warehousing jobs, 5th of 60 metros. ZIPs 85043, 85353, 85009.

Marked pallets in Arizona

We found no Arizona law on abandoned pooled pallets in the sources behind this page. A mark still means a likely owner, so Arizona loads get the same ownership check as any other.

Describing a Arizona load

Begin with the Arizona ZIP and the count, then the footprint. A warehousing and storage pile calls for photos of the yard stacks, from the dock side. For food manufacturing, take the deck surface and any staining.