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

Savannah in the numbers

The Savannah metro counts 6,384 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.34% of the US industry and 3.6% of private jobs in the metro, 42nd of 60 here.

It spans 3 counties: Bryan, Chatham and Effingham. Warehousing is 3.6% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 7.5% of Georgia's 84,730 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 31407 (Port Wentworth, 31).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Chatham (5,252), Bryan (1,019) and Effingham (113).

• Chatham County5,252 jobs, 82.3% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Bryan County1,019 jobs, 16.0% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Effingham County113 jobs, 1.8% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Savannah metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 2.5 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage6,384 jobs in 2025, 0.34% 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. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Food manufacturing1,386 jobs in 2025, 0.08% 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. 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. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.

On the freight lanes: I-95

Savannah sits on I-95, which runs from I-95 is the main north-south Interstate on the East Coast, running from Miami, Florida, to the Houlton-Woodstock border crossing between Maine and New Brunswick. The metros we track on it hold 127,866 private warehousing jobs, 6.7% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Northern New Jersey (39,367), Philadelphia (38,250), Miami (22,104), Jacksonville (15,384) and Baltimore (6,377).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Baltimore (6,377), Minneapolis (6,599) and Salt Lake City (6,623).

Elsewhere in Georgia

Atlanta (49,050 jobs, 7.68 times Savannah, busiest ZIP 30253) and Gainesville, Georgia (656 jobs, 0.10 times Savannah, 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 smaller market, with fewer sites within reach of each other. For a pile in Savannah, say whether it can be held and for how long, and whether the pallets are stacked where a truck can reach them.

What a Savannah load looks like

Expect warehousing and storage first: 6,384 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 Savannah pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.