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

Denver in the numbers

The Denver metro counts 15,858 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.83% of the US industry and 1.1% of private jobs in the metro, 27th of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 10 counties: Adams, Arapahoe, Broomfield, Clear Creek, Denver and Douglas and others. Warehousing is 1.1% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 64.6% of Colorado's 24,541 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 80011 (Aurora, 42).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Adams (12,162), Denver (2,456) and Arapahoe (944).

• Adams County12,162 jobs, 76.7% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Denver County2,456 jobs, 15.5% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Arapahoe County944 jobs, 6.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Denver metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 0.8 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage15,858 jobs in 2025, 0.83% 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.
• Grocery and related product wholesale10,938 jobs in 2025, 1.32% 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. 48 x 40 pallets of many styles and marks, nestables for returns and the rented pool pallets that arrive with suppliers’ freight. In a pile from here, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.

On the freight lanes: I-70

Denver sits on I-70, which runs from I-15 near Cove Fort, Utah, to I-695 near Baltimore, Maryland. The metros we track on it hold 135,057 private warehousing jobs, 7.1% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Columbus (34,200), Indianapolis (41,067), Kansas City (20,676), St. Louis (16,879) and Baltimore (6,377).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Jacksonville (15,384), San Antonio (16,751) and St. Louis (16,879).

What the size of the market means

A mid-sized warehouse market. Loads around Denver 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 Denver load looks like

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 15,858 jobs. Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side and, for grocery and related product wholesale, every mark, logo and RFID bump. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marks are checked before anything is ground.