Plastic pallet recycling in St. Louis: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

St. Louis in the numbers

With 16,879 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, St. Louis stands 25th of 60 metros in our data, 0.89% of the country. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 15 counties: Bond, Calhoun, Clinton, Jersey, Macoupin and Madison and others. Warehousing is 1.4% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 63.2% of Missouri's 26,726 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 63042 (Hazelwood, 32).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Madison (7,612).

• Madison County7,612 jobs, 45.1% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the St. Louis metro. The most concentrated is chemical manufacturing, at 1.6 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage16,879 jobs in 2025, 0.89% 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.
• Chemical manufacturing12,524 jobs in 2025, 1.40% of the US total. 48 x 48 pallets for four 55-gallon drums without overhang, 45 x 45 CP9 pallets for bags and boxes, often heavy-duty with sumps. In a pile from here, photograph any staining and the drum seats.

On the freight lanes: I-70

St. Louis sits on I-70, which runs from I-15 near Cove Fort, Utah, to I-695 near Baltimore, Maryland. The metros we track on it hold 135,057 private warehousing jobs, 7.1% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Columbus (34,200), Indianapolis (41,067), Kansas City (20,676), Denver (15,858) and Baltimore (6,377).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are San Antonio (16,751), Harrisburg (17,241) and Denver (15,858).

Elsewhere in Missouri

Kansas City (20,676 jobs, 1.22 times St. Louis, busiest ZIP 64161) is the other metro we cover in Missouri, which has 26,726 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A mid-sized warehouse market. Loads around St. Louis tend to come from a handful of big sites and a long tail of small ones, and a full trailer from one site is a different job from three part-loads from three. Say which yours is.

What a St. Louis load looks like

Expect warehousing and storage first: 16,879 jobs in 2025. Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side and, for chemical manufacturing, any staining and the drum seats. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Any St. Louis pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.