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

Milwaukee in the numbers

Milwaukee had 8,262 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, 0.43% of the national total and 37th of the 60 metros we cover. Only counties with disclosed figures are counted, so the true number is a little higher.

It spans 4 counties: Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha. Warehousing is 1.1% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 25.0% of Wisconsin's 33,054 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 53209 (Milwaukee, 7).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Milwaukee (4,244), Waukesha (3,634) and Washington (384).

• Milwaukee County4,244 jobs, 51.4% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Waukesha County3,634 jobs, 44.0% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Washington County384 jobs, 4.6% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Milwaukee metro. The most concentrated is food manufacturing, at 1.2 times the national share of employment.

• Food manufacturing11,405 jobs in 2025, 0.64% 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.
• Warehousing and storage8,262 jobs in 2025, 0.43% 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. 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. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.

On the freight lanes: I-94

Milwaukee sits on I-94, which runs from east of Billings, Montana, to Port Huron, Michigan, at the Blue Water Bridge to Canada, and is the only east-west Interstate with a direct Canadian connection. The metros we track on it hold 104,530 private warehousing jobs, 5.5% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Chicago (59,586), Detroit (30,083) and Minneapolis (6,599).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Oklahoma City (8,336), Portland (8,157) and San Francisco (9,473).

Elsewhere in Wisconsin

Green Bay (584 jobs, 0.07 times Milwaukee, busiest ZIP 54304) is the other metro we cover in Wisconsin, which has 33,054 warehousing jobs in all.

What the size of the market means

A mid-sized warehouse market. Loads around Milwaukee tend to come from a handful of big sites and a long tail of small ones, and a full trailer from one site is a different job from three part-loads from three. Say which yours is.

What a Milwaukee load looks like

Expect food manufacturing first: 11,405 jobs in 2025. 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. Any Milwaukee pallet with a name, tag or odd colour waits for an owner check.