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

Tampa in the numbers

The Tampa metro counts 13,205 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.69% of the US industry and 1.0% of private jobs in the metro, 32nd of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 4 counties: Pinellas, Hernando, Hillsborough and Pasco. Warehousing is 1.0% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 12.5% of Florida's 105,401 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 33619 (Tampa, 16).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Hillsborough (12,216) and Pinellas (989).

• Hillsborough County12,216 jobs, 92.5% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Pinellas County989 jobs, 7.5% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Tampa metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 0.7 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage13,205 jobs in 2025, 0.69% of the US total. 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 wholesale7,977 jobs in 2025, 0.96% of the US total. 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-75

Tampa sits on I-75, which runs from I-75 is 1,786 miles long, from the Hialeah-Miami Lakes border in Florida to Sault Ste. The metros we track on it hold 136,133 private warehousing jobs, 7.2% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Atlanta (49,050), Knoxville (1,751), Cincinnati (19,940), Miami (22,104) and Detroit (30,083).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Cleveland (13,652), Orlando (13,928) and Reno (12,269).

Elsewhere in Florida

Miami (22,104 jobs, 1.67 times Tampa, busiest ZIP 33178), Orlando (13,928 jobs, 1.05 times Tampa, busiest ZIP 32824) and Jacksonville (15,384 jobs, 1.17 times Tampa, busiest ZIP 32218) are the other metros we cover in Florida, which has 105,401 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

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

Expect warehousing and storage first: 13,205 jobs in 2025. 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. Any Tampa pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.