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

How Delaware compares

Across 134 establishments, warehousing and storage in Delaware employed 12,495 people in 2025. That is 0.66% of the national total and puts the state 36th of 50, with an average of 93.2 jobs per site.

The state sits in the South Atlantic, a Census division. Its sites average 93.2 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 0.57% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Where the warehousing jobs sit in Delaware

The counties with the most warehousing jobs, from the same BLS count: Sussex (80).

• Sussex County80 jobs, 0.6% of the Delaware total.

What fills the yards in Delaware

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

• Warehousing and storage12,495 private jobs in 2025, 0.7% 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. Check the strays first. Then separate the rackables, which are usually PP, from the nestables, which are usually HDPE. Describe each stack as its own line. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Food manufacturing11,157 private jobs in 2025, 0.6% 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.
• Meat and poultry processing9,741 private jobs in 2025, 1.7% of the US total. Washdown, grease and thermal cycling. Pallets are retired when the surface cannot be sanitised. Plant remodels retire whole colour-coded sets. In a pile from here, photograph the surface condition, close up.

The rest of Delaware's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 11,157 and pharmaceutical manufacturing 618. Measured against the national share of employment, meat and poultry processing is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 5.6 times.

Cold storage in Delaware

USDA counted 25 million cubic feet of gross refrigerated warehouse space in Delaware on October 1, 2025, 27th of 36 states. Cold stores wear pallets differently, and the refrigerated warehousing page says how.

What the size of the state means

Delaware 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 South Atlantic

Against Delaware's 12,495 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Atlanta, Georgia (49,050, 3.93 times), Miami, Florida (22,104, 1.77 times), Charlotte, North Carolina (18,437, 1.48 times), Jacksonville, Florida (15,384, 1.23 times), Orlando, Florida (13,928, 1.11 times) and Tampa, Florida (13,205, 1.06 times).

Next to Delaware

The table sets the warehousing counts of Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania against Delaware.

Loads from the rest of Delaware

Delaware 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 Delaware

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

Describing a Delaware load

Begin with the Delaware 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.