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

Green Bay in the numbers

With 584 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, Green Bay stands 59th of 60 metros in our data, 0.03% of the country. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 3 counties: Brown, Kewaunee and Oconto. Warehousing is 0.4% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 1.8% of Wisconsin's 33,054 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 54304 (Green Bay, 9).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Brown (584).

• Brown County584 jobs, 100.0% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

4 industries are named for the Green Bay metro. The most concentrated is dairy product manufacturing, at 9.5 times the national share of employment.

• Food manufacturing9,132 jobs in 2025, 0.51% 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. 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. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.
• Meat and poultry processing4,104 jobs in 2025, 0.74% of the US total. Grease and organic residue are contamination. Say how the pallets were cleaned. A degreased, dry load is a normal stream. A greasy one needs a conversation. In a pile from here, photograph the surface condition, close up.
• Dairy product manufacturing1,867 jobs in 2025, 1.11% of the US total. Hygienic 48 x 40 pallets in HDPE or PP, closed deck, easy to wash, used through chill rooms and dispatch. Say if pallets were washed with strong chemicals. Say if any are coloured to mark zones. Dairies often retire sets of one colour. In a pile from here, photograph the colour code and any cracks.
• Grocery and related product wholesale1,484 jobs in 2025, 0.18% of the US total. High volume and many inbound shippers. Strays collect at the back of the yard. Sets retire when a retailer changes its pallet standard. 48 x 40 pallets of many styles and marks, nestables for returns and the rented pool pallets that arrive with suppliers’ freight. In a pile from here, photograph every mark, logo and RFID bump.

Freight around Green Bay

Green Bay is not on one of the twelve corridors we read, so we place a load here by ZIP and by the distance to the nearest metro we cover, Gainesville, Georgia.

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Gainesville, Georgia (656), Salinas (298) and Yakima (1,309).

Elsewhere in Wisconsin

Milwaukee (8,262 jobs, 14.15 times Green Bay, busiest ZIP 53209) is the other metro we cover in Wisconsin, which has 33,054 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 Green Bay, say whether it can be held and for how long, and whether the pallets are stacked where a truck can reach them.

What a Green Bay load looks like

The biggest named industry is food manufacturing, with 9,132 jobs. Photograph the deck surface and any staining and, for meat and poultry processing, the surface condition, close up. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marked pallets get the ownership check first.