Plastic pallet recycling in Northern New Jersey: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Northern New Jersey in the numbers

The Northern New Jersey metro counts 39,367 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 2.07% of the US industry and 2.4% of private jobs in the metro, 7th of 60 here.

It spans 6 counties: Middlesex, Essex, Union, Bergen, Hudson and Passaic. Warehousing is 2.4% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 51.7% of New Jersey's 76,152 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 08817 (Edison, 41).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Middlesex (26,309), Hudson (4,344) and Bergen (3,580).

• Middlesex County26,309 jobs, 66.8% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Hudson County4,344 jobs, 11.0% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Bergen County3,580 jobs, 9.1% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

5 industries are named for the Northern New Jersey metro. The most concentrated is pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, at 3.6 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage39,367 jobs in 2025, 2.07% of the US total. General-purpose 48 x 40 pallets, nestables for empty storage and rackables on beams. Warehouses hold the widest mix of styles of any industry here, so mixed resin and mixed colour piles are normal. Check the strays first. Then separate the rackables, which are usually PP, from the nestables, which are usually HDPE. Describe each stack as its own line. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Chemical manufacturing25,799 jobs in 2025, 2.89% of the US total. Say what the pallets carried. A residue of an unknown chemical is a stop. A drum pallet that held a benign material is a normal stream. Chemical resistance is why plastic is chosen. Wear, leaks and spills retire them. CP9 changes retire a whole footprint. In a pile from here, photograph any staining and the drum seats.
• Grocery and related product wholesale22,444 jobs in 2025, 2.71% 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. 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.
• Pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing15,663 jobs in 2025, 4.46% of the US total. Hygienic 48 x 40 and 43 x 43 pallets, sometimes PP for sterilisation, with documents on resin and colour. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any batch plates.
• Refrigerated warehousing2,728 jobs in 2025, 3.73% of the US total. Say it came from cold storage. Brittle pallets grind fine. Wet pallets should be dry before they are stacked for a trailer. In a pile from here, photograph the cracks at corners and along the deck.

On the freight lanes: I-95 and I-80

Northern New Jersey sits on I-95, which runs from I-95 is the main north-south Interstate on the East Coast, running from Miami, Florida, to the Houlton-Woodstock border crossing between Maine and New Brunswick. The metros we track on it hold 127,866 private warehousing jobs, 6.7% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Savannah (6,384), Philadelphia (38,250), Miami (22,104), Jacksonville (15,384) and Baltimore (6,377).

Northern New Jersey 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), Scranton (18,912), Salt Lake City (6,623), Reno (12,269), Omaha (5,157) and Des Moines (4,393).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Philadelphia (38,250), Indianapolis (41,067) and Phoenix (42,340).

What the size of the market means

A market this size is made of many separate sites, so a pile in Northern New Jersey is rarely the only one nearby. Large distribution clusters bring pooled pallets and mixed footprints into the same trailer, which is why the marks and the sizes get listed before anything else.

What a Northern New Jersey load looks like

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 39,367 jobs. 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. Marks are checked before anything is ground.