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

Charlotte in the numbers

The Charlotte metro counts 18,437 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.97% of the US industry and 1.5% of private jobs in the metro, 23rd of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 11 counties: Anson, Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln and Mecklenburg and others. Warehousing is 1.5% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 33.8% of North Carolina's 54,551 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 28273 (Charlotte, 33).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Mecklenburg (12,290), York (3,009) and Rowan (1,800).

• Mecklenburg County12,290 jobs, 66.7% of the metro's disclosed total.
• York County3,009 jobs, 16.3% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Rowan County1,800 jobs, 9.8% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Charlotte metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 1.1 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage18,437 jobs in 2025, 0.97% 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. 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 manufacturing8,066 jobs in 2025, 0.90% of the US total. Chemical resistance is why plastic is chosen. Wear, leaks and spills retire them. CP9 changes retire a whole footprint. 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. In a pile from here, photograph any staining and the drum seats.

On the freight lanes: I-85

Charlotte sits on I-85, which runs from I-65 in Montgomery, Alabama, to I-95 near Petersburg, Virginia, and is a regional route serving Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. The metros we track on it hold 72,718 private warehousing jobs, 3.8% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Atlanta (49,050), Gainesville, Georgia (656) and Greenville (4,575).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Scranton (18,912), Lehigh Valley (19,122) and Nashville (19,548).

What the size of the market means

A mid-sized warehouse market. Loads around Charlotte 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 Charlotte load looks like

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 18,437 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.