Plastic pallet recycling in Virginia: what the yards hold and where it goes

How Virginia compares

Across 529 establishments, warehousing and storage in Virginia employed 51,123 people in 2025. That is 2.69% of the national total and puts the state 14th of 50, with an average of 96.6 jobs per site.

The state sits in the South Atlantic, a Census division. Its sites average 96.6 jobs against 81.5 across the country, and it holds 2.27% of the nation's warehousing establishments.

Where the warehousing jobs sit in Virginia

The counties with the most warehousing jobs, from the same BLS count: Suffolk city (6,757), Chesapeake city (3,851) and Chesterfield (3,728).

• Suffolk city County6,757 jobs, 13.2% of the Virginia total.
• Chesapeake city County3,851 jobs, 7.5% of the Virginia total.
• Chesterfield County3,728 jobs, 7.3% of the Virginia total.

What fills the yards in Virginia

2 further industries are named in the market data for Virginia. Each retires pallets for its own reasons.

• Warehousing and storage51,123 private jobs in 2025, 2.7% 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 manufacturing32,684 private jobs in 2025, 1.8% of the US total. 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.

The rest of Virginia's pallet economy

Private jobs in 2025: food manufacturing 32,684, pharmaceutical manufacturing 2,939, motor vehicle assembly 3,460 and auto parts 3,859. Measured against the national share of employment, warehousing and storage is the most concentrated pallet-using industry here, at 1.1 times.

Cold storage in Virginia

USDA counted 72 million cubic feet of gross refrigerated warehouse space in Virginia on October 1, 2025, 17th of 36 states. Cold stores wear pallets differently, and the refrigerated warehousing page says how.

What the size of the state means

Virginia is a mid-table warehouse state. The jobs sit in a few places, and a pile outside them is the exception. Give the ZIP early, because distance to the nearest cluster decides how a load is placed.

Big metros elsewhere in the South Atlantic

Against Virginia's 51,123 warehousing jobs, the largest metros in the same division are Atlanta, Georgia (49,050, 0.96 times), Miami, Florida (22,104, 0.43 times), Charlotte, North Carolina (18,437, 0.36 times), Jacksonville, Florida (15,384, 0.30 times), Orlando, Florida (13,928, 0.27 times) and Tampa, Florida (13,205, 0.26 times).

Next to Virginia

The table sets the warehousing counts of Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia against Virginia.

Loads from the rest of Virginia

Virginia has no metro page yet. A load from anywhere in the state goes the same way: ZIP, count, what the pallets carried, and we say which lane suits it.

Marked pallets in Virginia

Virginia has no rule we can cite on stray proprietary pallets. Until an owner is ruled out by the marks, nothing in a Virginia load is ground.

Describing a Virginia load

Three facts first for Virginia: ZIP, count, footprint. Pallets from food manufacturing want the deck surface and any staining photographed; warehousing and storage pallets want the yard stacks, from the dock side photographed.