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

Atlanta in the numbers

With 49,050 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, Atlanta stands 4th of 60 metros in our data, 2.58% of the country. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 29 counties: Barrow, Butts, Carroll, Clayton, Coweta and Dawson and others. Warehousing is 1.9% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 57.9% of Georgia's 84,730 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 30253 (Mcdonough, 51).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Fulton (18,317), Henry (7,904) and Cobb (6,201).

• Fulton County18,317 jobs, 37.3% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Henry County7,904 jobs, 16.1% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Cobb County6,201 jobs, 12.6% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Atlanta metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 1.4 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage49,050 jobs in 2025, 2.58% of the US total. 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 manufacturing22,288 jobs in 2025, 1.26% 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.

On the freight lanes: I-85 and I-75

Atlanta sits on I-85, which runs from I-65 in Montgomery, Alabama, to I-95 near Petersburg, Virginia, and is a regional route serving Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. The metros we track on it hold 72,718 private warehousing jobs, 3.8% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Gainesville, Georgia (656), Greenville (4,575) and Charlotte (18,437).

Atlanta 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: Knoxville (1,751), Cincinnati (19,940), Miami (22,104), Tampa (13,205) and Detroit (30,083).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Phoenix (42,340), Indianapolis (41,067) and Northern New Jersey (39,367).

Elsewhere in Georgia

Savannah (6,384 jobs, 0.13 times Atlanta, busiest ZIP 31407) and Gainesville, Georgia (656 jobs, 0.01 times Atlanta, busiest ZIP 30507) are the other metros we cover in Georgia, which has 84,730 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A market this size is made of many separate sites, so a pile in Atlanta is rarely the only one nearby. Large distribution clusters bring pooled pallets and mixed footprints into the same trailer, which is why the marks and the sizes get listed before anything else.

What a Atlanta load looks like

Expect warehousing and storage first: 49,050 jobs in 2025. Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side and, for food manufacturing, the deck surface and any staining. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Any Atlanta pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.