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

Sioux Falls in the numbers

The Sioux Falls metro counts 2,930 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 0.15% of the US industry and 1.8% of private jobs in the metro, 52nd of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 5 counties: Rock, Lincoln, McCook, Minnehaha and Turner. Warehousing is 1.8% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 89.6% of South Dakota's 3,269 warehousing jobs. 1 ZIP code stands out for sites, led by 57104 (Sioux Falls, 5).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Minnehaha (2,930).

• Minnehaha County2,930 jobs, 100.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Sioux Falls metro. The most concentrated is food manufacturing, at 1.9 times the national share of employment.

• Food manufacturing4,118 jobs in 2025, 0.23% of the US total. Hygienic 48 x 40 and 40 x 48 pallets in HDPE or PP, often with closed decks and colour-coding by zone. Some are listed as food safe but not approved for direct food contact. Sanitation audits remove cracked or stained pallets. A change of packaging line retires a colour-coded set. Pallets that held ingredients with strong odours or oils are culled early. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.
• Warehousing and storage2,930 jobs in 2025, 0.15% of the US total. 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. 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.

Freight around Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls 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, Northwest Arkansas.

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Northwest Arkansas (3,065), Grand Rapids (3,125) and Charleston (3,242).

What the size of the market means

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

What a Sioux Falls load looks like

Expect food manufacturing first: 4,118 jobs in 2025. Photograph the deck surface and any staining and, for warehousing and storage, the yard stacks, from the dock side. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Any Sioux Falls pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.