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

How Hawaii compares

Counting 1,298 private jobs in warehousing and storage at 57 sites, Hawaii stands 47th among the states, 0.07% of the country. The mean site holds 22.8 workers.

The state sits in the Pacific states, a Census division. Its sites average 22.8 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 0.24% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Counties in Hawaii

The BLS county figures for Hawaii are not broken out here, so the page works from the state total of 1,298 jobs. Give a ZIP and we place the load.

What fills the yards in Hawaii

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

• Food manufacturing6,032 private jobs in 2025, 0.3% 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.
• Grocery and related product wholesale5,408 private jobs in 2025, 0.7% 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. Sort marked from unmarked first. Count the unmarked by style. This industry is where the ownership check matters most. In a pile from here, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.

The rest of Hawaii's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 6,032. Measured against the national share of employment, grocery and related product wholesale is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 1.7 times.

What the size of the state means

Hawaii 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 Pacific states

Against Hawaii's 1,298 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Inland Empire, California (118,368, 91.19 times), Stockton, California (28,518, 21.97 times), Los Angeles, California (27,225, 20.97 times), Seattle, Washington (23,062, 17.77 times), San Francisco, California (9,473, 7.30 times) and Portland, Oregon (8,157, 6.28 times).

Closest to Hawaii in warehousing jobs

The table sets the warehousing counts of North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska against Hawaii.

Loads from the rest of Hawaii

Hawaii 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 Hawaii

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

Describing a Hawaii load

Begin with the Hawaii ZIP and the count, then the footprint. A food manufacturing pile calls for photos of the deck surface and any staining. For grocery and related product wholesale, take every mark, logo and RFID bump.