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

Austin in the numbers

With 5,657 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, Austin stands 44th of 60 metros in our data, 0.30% of the country. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 5 counties: Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Travis and Williamson. Warehousing is 0.5% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 3.2% of Texas's 175,579 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 78744 (Austin, 15).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Travis (5,179) and Williamson (478).

• Travis County5,179 jobs, 91.6% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Williamson County478 jobs, 8.4% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Austin metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 0.4 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage5,657 jobs in 2025, 0.30% 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.
• Food manufacturing3,934 jobs in 2025, 0.22% 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. 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-35

Austin 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), Kansas City (20,676), Minneapolis (6,599), Oklahoma City (8,336) and Des Moines (4,393).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Omaha (5,157), Fresno (5,006) and Baltimore (6,377).

Elsewhere in Texas

Dallas (82,593 jobs, 14.60 times Austin, busiest ZIP 75050), Houston (33,785 jobs, 5.97 times Austin, busiest ZIP 77571), Laredo (2,014 jobs, 0.36 times Austin, busiest ZIP 78045) and San Antonio (16,751 jobs, 2.96 times Austin, busiest ZIP 78218) are the other metros we cover in Texas, which has 175,579 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 Austin, say whether it can be held and for how long, and whether the pallets are stacked where a truck can reach them.

What a Austin load looks like

Expect warehousing and storage first: 5,657 jobs in 2025. 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. Any Austin pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.