Plastic pallets from warehouses and storage yards: what a load needs

What warehouses use

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.

Why the pallets break or retire

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.

What a load from here needs

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.

Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side. Then add the ZIP, the count and the footprint.

Where this industry is biggest

BLS counted 1,901,976 private jobs across 23,345 establishments in warehousing and storage (NAICS 493) in 2025. The states with the most jobs were California (236,923), Texas (175,579), Pennsylvania (123,481), Florida (105,401) and Ohio (98,354).

Where warehousing and storage sits among the thirteen

Of the thirteen industries on this site, warehousing and storage ranks 1 by jobs, with 22.6% of the thirteen’s 8,423,298 combined jobs, and 3 by jobs per site, at 81.5 against 42.6 for all thirteen together. Big sites usually mean big piles and fewer, larger loads. Small sites mean more calls and smaller trailers.

Writing the request for warehousing and storage

Name the plant type, the pallet size you hold and the count, give the pickup ZIP and say whether trucks can reach a dock. For warehousing and storage, add what the pallets carried and whether they were washed, since that history shapes how a recycler grades the lot. Photographs of a typical pallet and of the pile make the reply faster and more exact.