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

How Montana compares

Counting 428 private jobs in warehousing and storage at 52 sites, Montana stands 50th among the states, 0.02% of the country. The mean site holds 8.2 workers.

The state sits in the Mountain states, a Census division. Its sites average 8.2 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 0.22% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Where the warehousing jobs sit in Montana

The counties with the most warehousing jobs, from the same BLS count: Yellowstone (122), Gallatin (48) and Toole (45).

• Yellowstone County122 jobs, 28.5% of the Montana total.
• Gallatin County48 jobs, 11.2% of the Montana total.
• Toole County45 jobs, 10.5% of the Montana total.

What fills the yards in Montana

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

• Food manufacturing2,492 private jobs in 2025, 0.1% of the US total. 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 wholesale2,459 private jobs in 2025, 0.3% of the US total. 48 x 40 pallets of many styles and marks, nestables for returns and the rented pool pallets that arrive with suppliers’ freight. High volume and many inbound shippers. Strays collect at the back of the yard. Sets retire when a retailer changes its pallet standard. In a pile from here, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.

The rest of Montana's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 2,492, pharmaceutical manufacturing 631 and auto parts 56. Measured against the national share of employment, food manufacturing is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 0.4 times.

What the size of the state means

Montana 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 Montana's 428 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Phoenix, Arizona (42,340, 98.93 times), Las Vegas, Nevada (28,250, 66.00 times), Denver, Colorado (15,858, 37.05 times), Reno, Nevada (12,269, 28.67 times) and Salt Lake City, Utah (6,623, 15.47 times).

Next to Montana

The table sets the warehousing counts of Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming against Montana.

Loads from the rest of Montana

Montana 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 Montana

No Montana-specific rule on stray proprietary pallets appears in our sources. Check every pallet for marks first; California's AB 1760 is the one rule we cite.

Describing a Montana load

For a Montana pickup: ZIP, count, footprint. From food manufacturing, photograph the deck surface and any staining. From grocery and related product wholesale, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.