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

Oklahoma City in the numbers

With 8,336 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, Oklahoma City stands 36th of 60 metros in our data, 0.44% of the country. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 7 counties: Canadian, Cleveland, Grady, Lincoln, Logan and McClain and others. Warehousing is 1.5% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 42.4% of Oklahoma's 19,669 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 73179 (Oklahoma City, 9).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Oklahoma (8,307) and Canadian (29).

• Oklahoma County8,307 jobs, 99.7% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Canadian County29 jobs, 0.3% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

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

• Warehousing and storage8,336 jobs in 2025, 0.44% 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.
• Grocery and related product wholesale4,281 jobs in 2025, 0.52% 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.

On the freight lanes: I-40 and I-35

Oklahoma City sits on I-40, which runs from I-40 is a transcontinental Interstate 2,556 miles long through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, the third-longest in the country. The metros we track on it hold 57,377 private warehousing jobs, 3.0% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Memphis (27,742), Nashville (19,548) and Knoxville (1,751).

Oklahoma City sits on I-35, which runs from Laredo, Texas, at the Mexican border to Duluth, Minnesota, splitting into I-35E and I-35W at Dallas-Fort Worth and again at the Twin Cities. The metros we track on it hold 147,019 private warehousing jobs, 7.7% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Dallas (82,593), Laredo (2,014), San Antonio (16,751), Austin (5,657), Kansas City (20,676), Minneapolis (6,599) and Des Moines (4,393).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Milwaukee (8,262), Portland (8,157) and San Francisco (9,473).

What the size of the market means

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

The biggest named industry is warehousing and storage, with 8,336 jobs. Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side and, for grocery and related product wholesale, every mark, logo and RFID bump. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marked pallets get the ownership check first.