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

Pittsburgh in the numbers

Pittsburgh had 9,826 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, 0.52% of the national total and 34th of the 60 metros we cover. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 8 counties: Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette and Lawrence and others. Warehousing is 1.0% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 8.0% of Pennsylvania's 123,481 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 16066 (Cranberry Township, 10).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Allegheny (5,508), Westmoreland (2,899) and Butler (707).

• Allegheny County5,508 jobs, 56.1% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Westmoreland County2,899 jobs, 29.5% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Butler County707 jobs, 7.2% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Pittsburgh metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 0.7 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage9,826 jobs in 2025, 0.52% of the US total. 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. 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. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Food manufacturing6,239 jobs in 2025, 0.35% of the US total. Say what the pallets carried. A load that touched edible oil is a different bin from a load that sat under sealed cartons. FDA does not approve pallet models, and recycled regrind is not made for food contact. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.

Freight around Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh 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, San Francisco.

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are San Francisco (9,473), Oklahoma City (8,336) and Milwaukee (8,262).

Elsewhere in Pennsylvania

Lehigh Valley (19,122 jobs, 1.95 times Pittsburgh, busiest ZIP 18031), Harrisburg (17,241 jobs, 1.75 times Pittsburgh, busiest ZIP 17050), Philadelphia (38,250 jobs, 3.89 times Pittsburgh, busiest ZIP 08102), Lancaster (6,994 jobs, 0.71 times Pittsburgh, busiest ZIP 17601) and Scranton (18,912 jobs, 1.92 times Pittsburgh, busiest ZIP 18640) are the other metros we cover in Pennsylvania, which has 123,481 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

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

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 9,826 jobs. Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side and, for food manufacturing, the deck surface and any staining. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marks are checked before anything is ground.