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

Cleveland in the numbers

With 13,652 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, Cleveland stands 31st of 60 metros in our data, 0.72% of the country. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 6 counties: Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina. Warehousing is 1.5% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 13.9% of Ohio's 98,354 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 44139 (Solon, 10).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Cuyahoga (12,498), Medina (530) and Lorain (422).

• Cuyahoga County12,498 jobs, 91.5% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Medina County530 jobs, 3.9% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Lorain County422 jobs, 3.1% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

3 industries are named for the Cleveland metro. The most concentrated is motor vehicle parts manufacturing, at 2.4 times the national share of employment.

• Chemical manufacturing11,126 jobs in 2025, 1.25% 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.
• Motor vehicle parts manufacturing8,452 jobs in 2025, 1.62% of the US total. 48 x 45 pallets matching heavy auto parts bulk containers, and 48 x 40 for general parts flows. Often heavy-duty HDPE with high static ratings. Uniform stock is easy to describe: one footprint, one colour, one maker. Say if oil or metal swarf was on the decks. In a pile from here, photograph the stack and a runner close up.
• Plastics product manufacturing5,137 jobs in 2025, 0.89% of the US total. Retired stock after a product line ends. Some processors regrind their own scrap, and a pallet pile is one more feedstock. In a pile from here, photograph moulded codes and maker marks.

Freight around Cleveland

Cleveland is not on one of the twelve corridors we read, so we place a load here by ZIP and by the distance to the nearest metro we cover, Orlando.

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Orlando (13,928), Tampa (13,205) and Louisville/Jefferson County (14,533).

Elsewhere in Ohio

Columbus (34,200 jobs, 2.51 times Cleveland, busiest ZIP 43137) and Cincinnati (19,940 jobs, 1.46 times Cleveland, busiest ZIP 41048) are the other metros we cover in Ohio, which has 98,354 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

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

The biggest named industry is chemical manufacturing, with 11,126 jobs. Photograph any staining and the drum seats and, for motor vehicle parts manufacturing, the stack and a runner close up. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marked pallets get the ownership check first.