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

Memphis in the numbers

The Memphis metro counts 27,742 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 1.46% of the US industry and 5.3% of private jobs in the metro, 14th of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 9 counties: Crittenden, Benton, DeSoto, Marshall, Tate and Tunica and others. Warehousing is 5.3% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 51.9% of Tennessee's 53,427 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 38118 (Memphis, 63).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Shelby (11,727), DeSoto (11,634) and Marshall (3,876).

• Shelby County11,727 jobs, 42.3% of the metro's disclosed total.
• DeSoto County11,634 jobs, 41.9% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Marshall County3,876 jobs, 14.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Memphis metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 3.7 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage27,742 jobs in 2025, 1.46% 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.
• Food manufacturing5,686 jobs in 2025, 0.32% 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.

On the freight lanes: I-40

Memphis 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: Nashville (19,548), Knoxville (1,751) and Oklahoma City (8,336).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Las Vegas (28,250), Los Angeles (27,225) and Stockton (28,518).

Elsewhere in Tennessee

Nashville (19,548 jobs, 0.70 times Memphis, busiest ZIP 37086) and Knoxville (1,751 jobs, 0.06 times Memphis, busiest ZIP 37921) are the other metros we cover in Tennessee, which has 53,427 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A market this size is made of many separate sites, so a pile in Memphis is rarely the only one nearby. Large distribution clusters bring pooled pallets and mixed footprints into the same trailer, which is why the marks and the sizes get listed before anything else.

What a Memphis load looks like

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 27,742 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.