Plastic pallet recycling in Salinas: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Salinas in the numbers

The Salinas metro counts 298 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.02% of the US industry and 0.2% of private jobs in the metro, 60th of 60 here.

It spans 1 county: Monterey. Being a one-county metro, its county and its metro counts are the same figure. Warehousing is 0.2% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 0.1% of California's 236,923 warehousing jobs. 2 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 93901 (Salinas, 9).

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Salinas metro. The most concentrated is beverage manufacturing, at 2.4 times the national share of employment.

• Grocery and related product wholesale2,256 jobs in 2025, 0.27% 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.
• Beverage manufacturing937 jobs in 2025, 0.30% of the US total. Heavy pallets weigh a lot. Say the footprint and model if you know it. Stack sound ones apart, since a sound heavy-duty stackable can be worth reusing. In a pile from here, photograph the runners and the model plate.

Freight around Salinas

Salinas is not on one of the twelve corridors we read, so we place a load here by ZIP and by the distance to the nearest metro we cover, Green Bay.

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Green Bay (584), Gainesville, Georgia (656) and Yakima (1,309).

Elsewhere in California

Los Angeles (27,225 jobs, 91.36 times Salinas, busiest ZIP 90670), Inland Empire (118,368 jobs, 397.21 times Salinas, busiest ZIP 91761), Fresno (5,006 jobs, 16.80 times Salinas, busiest ZIP 93725), Stockton (28,518 jobs, 95.70 times Salinas, busiest ZIP 95206) and San Francisco (9,473 jobs, 31.79 times Salinas, busiest ZIP 94545) are the other metros we cover in California, which has 236,923 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A smaller market, with fewer sites within reach of each other. For a pile in Salinas, say whether it can be held and for how long, and whether the pallets are stacked where a truck can reach them.

What a Salinas load looks like

Expect grocery and related product wholesale first: 2,256 jobs in 2025. Photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump and, for beverage manufacturing, the runners and the model plate. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. California AB 1760 sets a 35-day period before stray proprietary pallets can be declared abandoned, so marks are checked first.