Plastic pallet recycling in Salt Lake City: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Salt Lake City in the numbers

Salt Lake City had 6,623 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, 0.35% of the national total and 40th of the 60 metros we cover. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 2 counties: Salt Lake and Tooele. Warehousing is 0.9% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 48.4% of Utah's 13,683 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 84104 (Salt Lake City, 54).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Salt Lake (6,623).

• Salt Lake County6,623 jobs, 100.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Salt Lake City metro. The most concentrated is food manufacturing, at 0.8 times the national share of employment.

• Food manufacturing7,325 jobs in 2025, 0.41% 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.
• Warehousing and storage6,623 jobs in 2025, 0.35% 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.

On the freight lanes: I-80

Salt Lake City sits on I-80, which runs from I-80 is 2,900 miles long, from San Francisco, California, to I-95 at Teaneck, New Jersey, through California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The metros we track on it hold 155,780 private warehousing jobs, 8.2% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: San Francisco (9,473), Chicago (59,586), Northern New Jersey (39,367), Scranton (18,912), Reno (12,269), Omaha (5,157) and Des Moines (4,393).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Minneapolis (6,599), Savannah (6,384) and Baltimore (6,377).

What the size of the market means

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

What a Salt Lake City load looks like

The biggest named industry is food manufacturing, with 7,325 jobs. 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. Marked pallets get the ownership check first.