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

Des Moines in the numbers

The Des Moines metro counts 4,393 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.23% of the US industry and 1.2% of private jobs in the metro, 48th of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 6 counties: Dallas, Guthrie, Jasper, Madison, Polk and Warren. Warehousing is 1.2% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 22.2% of Iowa's 19,824 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 50313 (Des Moines, 13).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Polk (4,393).

• Polk County4,393 jobs, 100.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Des Moines metro. The most concentrated is food manufacturing, at 1.0 times the national share of employment.

• Food manufacturing4,620 jobs in 2025, 0.26% 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. 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.
• Warehousing and storage4,393 jobs in 2025, 0.23% 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.

On the freight lanes: I-35 and I-80

Des Moines sits on I-35, which runs from Laredo, Texas, at the Mexican border to Duluth, Minnesota, splitting into I-35E and I-35W at Dallas-Fort Worth and again at the Twin Cities. The metros we track on it hold 147,019 private warehousing jobs, 7.7% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Dallas (82,593), Laredo (2,014), San Antonio (16,751), Austin (5,657), Kansas City (20,676), Minneapolis (6,599) and Oklahoma City (8,336).

Des Moines sits on I-80, which runs from I-80 is 2,900 miles long, from San Francisco, California, to I-95 at Teaneck, New Jersey, through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The metros we track on it hold 155,780 private warehousing jobs, 8.2% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: San Francisco (9,473), Chicago (59,586), Northern New Jersey (39,367), Scranton (18,912), Salt Lake City (6,623), Reno (12,269) and Omaha (5,157).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Greenville (4,575), Fresno (5,006) and Omaha (5,157).

What the size of the market means

A smaller market, with fewer sites within reach of each other. For a pile in Des Moines, say whether it can be held and for how long, and whether the pallets are stacked where a truck can reach them.

What a Des Moines load looks like

The biggest named industry is food manufacturing, with 4,620 jobs. Photograph the deck surface and any staining and, for warehousing and storage, the yard stacks, from the dock side. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marked pallets get the ownership check first.