Plastic pallet recycling in Dallas-Fort Worth: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Dallas-Fort Worth in the numbers

The Dallas-Fort Worth metro counts 82,593 private jobs in warehousing and storage for 2025. That is 4.34% of the US industry and 2.3% of private jobs in the metro, 2nd of 60 here. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 11 counties: Collin, Dallas, Denton, Ellis, Hunt and Kaufman and others. Warehousing is 2.3% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 47.0% of Texas's 175,579 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 75050 (Grand Prairie, 39).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Dallas (44,657), Tarrant (19,462) and Denton (8,516).

• Dallas County44,657 jobs, 54.1% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Tarrant County19,462 jobs, 23.6% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Denton County8,516 jobs, 10.3% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Dallas-Fort Worth metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 1.6 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage82,593 jobs in 2025, 4.34% 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. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Food manufacturing25,839 jobs in 2025, 1.46% 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

Dallas-Fort Worth 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: Laredo (2,014), San Antonio (16,751), Austin (5,657), 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 Chicago (59,586), Atlanta (49,050) and Inland Empire (118,368).

Elsewhere in Texas

Houston (33,785 jobs, 0.41 times Dallas-Fort Worth, busiest ZIP 77571), Laredo (2,014 jobs, 0.02 times Dallas-Fort Worth, busiest ZIP 78045), San Antonio (16,751 jobs, 0.20 times Dallas-Fort Worth, busiest ZIP 78218) and Austin (5,657 jobs, 0.07 times Dallas-Fort Worth, busiest ZIP 78744) are the other metros we cover in Texas, which has 175,579 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 Dallas-Fort Worth 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 Dallas-Fort Worth load looks like

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 82,593 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.