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

How Idaho compares

Counting 2,445 private jobs in warehousing and storage at 146 sites, Idaho stands 44th among the states, 0.13% of the country. The mean site holds 16.7 workers.

The state sits in the Mountain states, a Census division. Its sites average 16.7 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 0.63% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Where the warehousing jobs sit in Idaho

The counties with the most warehousing jobs, from the same BLS count: Ada (1,025), Canyon (654) and Bonneville (175).

• Ada County1,025 jobs, 41.9% of the Idaho total.
• Canyon County654 jobs, 26.7% of the Idaho total.
• Bonneville County175 jobs, 7.2% of the Idaho total.

What fills the yards in Idaho

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

• Food manufacturing21,363 private jobs in 2025, 1.2% 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. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.
• Fruit and vegetable preserving7,461 private jobs in 2025, 4.3% of the US total. Sticky residue grinds badly. Rinse where you can and say where you cannot. Count by footprint, because 56 x 44 and 48 x 40 are separate jobs. A pack season ends and the yard is cleared. Sugar and acid residue stain decks. A customer standard change retires a footprint. In a pile from here, photograph a stack from the side, and a stained deck.
• Dairy product manufacturing5,027 private jobs in 2025, 3.0% of the US total. Say if pallets were washed with strong chemicals. Say if any are coloured to mark zones. Dairies often retire sets of one colour. In a pile from here, photograph the colour code and any cracks.

The rest of Idaho's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 21,363, pharmaceutical manufacturing 365 and auto parts 480. Measured against the national share of employment, fruit and vegetable preserving is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 7.6 times.

Cold storage in Idaho

USDA counted 58 million cubic feet of gross refrigerated warehouse space in Idaho on October 1, 2025, 21st of 36 states. Cold stores wear pallets differently, and the refrigerated warehousing page says how.

What the size of the state means

Idaho 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 Mountain states

Against Idaho's 2,445 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Phoenix, Arizona (42,340, 17.32 times), Las Vegas, Nevada (28,250, 11.55 times), Denver, Colorado (15,858, 6.49 times), Reno, Nevada (12,269, 5.02 times) and Salt Lake City, Utah (6,623, 2.71 times).

Next to Idaho

The table sets the warehousing counts of Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming against Idaho.

Loads from the rest of Idaho

Idaho 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 Idaho

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

Describing a Idaho load

Begin with the Idaho ZIP and the count, then the footprint. A food manufacturing pile calls for photos of the deck surface and any staining. For fruit and vegetable preserving, take a stack from the side, and a stained deck.