Plastic pallet recycling in Seattle-Tacoma: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Seattle-Tacoma in the numbers

Seattle-Tacoma had 23,062 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, 1.21% of the national total and 16th of the 60 metros we cover.

It spans 3 counties: Snohomish, King and Pierce. Warehousing is 1.3% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 62.9% of Washington's 36,691 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 98032 (Kent, 41).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Pierce (10,323), King (9,341) and Snohomish (3,398).

• Pierce County10,323 jobs, 44.8% of the metro's disclosed total.
• King County9,341 jobs, 40.5% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Snohomish County3,398 jobs, 14.7% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Seattle-Tacoma metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 0.9 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage23,062 jobs in 2025, 1.21% 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 manufacturing15,003 jobs in 2025, 0.85% 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-5

Seattle-Tacoma sits on I-5, which runs from I-5 is the West Coast's main north-south Interstate through California, Oregon and Washington, and the only continuous Interstate joining the Mexican and Canadian borders. The metros we track on it hold 86,962 private warehousing jobs, 4.6% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Los Angeles (27,225), Stockton (28,518) and Portland (8,157).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Miami (22,104), Kansas City (20,676) and Cincinnati (19,940).

Elsewhere in Washington

Yakima (1,309 jobs, 0.06 times Seattle-Tacoma, busiest ZIP 98930) is the other metro we cover in Washington, which has 36,691 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 Seattle-Tacoma 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 Seattle-Tacoma load looks like

Expect warehousing and storage first: 23,062 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 Seattle-Tacoma pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.