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

Charleston in the numbers

Charleston had 3,242 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, 0.17% of the national total and 49th of the 60 metros we cover.

It spans 3 counties: Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester. Warehousing is 1.0% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 11.9% of South Carolina's 27,150 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 29456 (Ladson, 16).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Dorchester (1,319), Berkeley (1,107) and Charleston (816).

• Dorchester County1,319 jobs, 40.7% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Berkeley County1,107 jobs, 34.1% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Charleston County816 jobs, 25.2% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

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

• Warehousing and storage3,242 jobs in 2025, 0.17% 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 manufacturing2,486 jobs in 2025, 0.28% 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.

Freight around Charleston

Charleston 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, Grand Rapids.

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Grand Rapids (3,125), Northwest Arkansas (3,065) and Sioux Falls (2,930).

Elsewhere in South Carolina

Greenville (4,575 jobs, 1.41 times Charleston, busiest ZIP 29651) is the other metro we cover in South Carolina, which has 27,150 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A smaller market, with fewer sites within reach of each other. For a pile in Charleston, say whether it can be held and for how long, and whether the pallets are stacked where a truck can reach them.

What a Charleston load looks like

Expect warehousing and storage first: 3,242 jobs in 2025. 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. Any Charleston pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.