Plastic pallet recycling in San Francisco-Oakland: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

San Francisco-Oakland in the numbers

With 9,473 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, San Francisco-Oakland stands 35th of 60 metros in our data, 0.50% of the country.

It spans 5 counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin. Warehousing is 0.5% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 4.0% of California's 236,923 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 94545 (Hayward, 21).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Alameda (5,777), Contra Costa (2,580) and San Mateo (848).

• Alameda County5,777 jobs, 61.0% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Contra Costa County2,580 jobs, 27.2% of the metro's disclosed total.
• San Mateo County848 jobs, 9.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the San Francisco-Oakland metro. The most concentrated is pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, at 2.0 times the national share of employment.

• Food manufacturing16,356 jobs in 2025, 0.92% of the US total. 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. 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. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.
• Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing10,914 jobs in 2025, 3.11% of the US total. Validation changes, cleanroom upgrades and audits retire pallets in lots. Pallets are often kept sound and retired for compliance, not damage. A sound, clean, documented pallet is worth more as a pallet. Say if paperwork exists. Say if any pallet touched product or chemicals. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any batch plates.

On the freight lanes: I-80

San Francisco-Oakland sits on I-80, which runs from I-80 is 2,900 miles long, from San Francisco, California, to I-95 at Teaneck, New Jersey, through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The metros we track on it hold 155,780 private warehousing jobs, 8.2% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Chicago (59,586), Northern New Jersey (39,367), Scranton (18,912), Salt Lake City (6,623), Reno (12,269), Omaha (5,157) and Des Moines (4,393).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Pittsburgh (9,826), Oklahoma City (8,336) and Milwaukee (8,262).

Elsewhere in California

Los Angeles (27,225 jobs, 2.87 times San Francisco-Oakland, busiest ZIP 90670), Inland Empire (118,368 jobs, 12.50 times San Francisco-Oakland, busiest ZIP 91761), Fresno (5,006 jobs, 0.53 times San Francisco-Oakland, busiest ZIP 93725), Stockton (28,518 jobs, 3.01 times San Francisco-Oakland, busiest ZIP 95206) and Salinas (298 jobs, 0.03 times San Francisco-Oakland, busiest ZIP 93901) are the other metros we cover in California, which has 236,923 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A mid-sized warehouse market. Loads around San Francisco-Oakland tend to come from a handful of big sites and a long tail of small ones, and a full trailer from one site is a different job from three part-loads from three. Say which yours is.

What a San Francisco-Oakland load looks like

The biggest named industry is food manufacturing, with 16,356 jobs. Photograph the deck surface and any staining and, for pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, the deck surface and any batch plates. 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.