The Yard Journal
Notes from the sort line
38 long-form posts about what actually happens to a wooden pallet: how it is graded, what it costs, why it fails, where it goes and what any of that has to do with Colorado. Written by the people who do the work, not by a content agency.
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The pallet shortage that wasn't
Twice a year somebody announces a national pallet shortage. Twice a year it turns out to be a regional core supply imbalance with a four-week lag. The difference matters if you are buying.
Why we still don't have a phone number
It is the question we are challenged on most, it is a completely fair challenge, and the answer is not that we are being difficult. It is that a pallet quote does not survive a voicemail.
What the crating shop learned shipping a 16,400 lb CNC machine
A machining centre bound for Rotterdam, a six-runner skid, and four design decisions that were not obvious. The most useful project the crating shop has ever run.
Everything we have written
Showing 38 of 38 posts.
The pallet shortage that wasn't
Twice a year somebody announces a national pallet shortage. Twice a year it turns out to be a regional core supply imbalance with a four-week lag. The difference matters if you are buying.
Why we still don't have a phone number
It is the question we are challenged on most, it is a completely fair challenge, and the answer is not that we are being difficult. It is that a pallet quote does not survive a voicemail.
What the crating shop learned shipping a 16,400 lb CNC machine
A machining centre bound for Rotterdam, a six-runner skid, and four design decisions that were not obvious. The most useful project the crating shop has ever run.
Hiring on the repair line: what we actually look for
We have hired thirty-one people onto the repair line and the sort line over eleven years. The trait that predicts who stays is not strength, speed or experience with wood.
How pallet wood becomes mulch, and what it really costs
Grinding is the last stop, not the first, and it loses money on every pallet that should have gone somewhere else. The full process, the screens, the safety exclusions and the honest economics.
What your dock tells us before we arrive
Ninety per cent of failed pallet collections fail for six boring reasons, all of which could have been settled in one email. Here is what a dispatcher actually needs to know about your site.
What changed in pallet pricing this year
Our annual look at what actually moved. Core supply stayed tight, Grade A held, Grade B softened, and the gap between new and recycled narrowed for the first time since 2021.
Winterising a pallet stack: a one-hour job worth a thousand dollars
Five things to do in October that protect what your accumulated pallets are worth in March. None of them costs anything and most facilities do none of them.
A pallet's résumé: tracking one core through seven lives
We stencilled one pallet in 2017 and followed it. Seven owners, four repairs, two footprints and one flower bed later, here is the whole working life of a single piece of wood.
Automation ate our Grade B business
Five years ago Grade B was 48% of what we sold. Today it is 31%, and the reason is not price. Automated warehouses cannot use a pallet with a companion stringer.
What our carbon numbers would look like if we cheated
There are five entirely legitimate-looking accounting choices that would roughly quadruple our published carbon savings. We have taken none of them, and here is exactly what each one is worth.
Hemp, cannabis and the bulk bin problem in Colorado
An industry that grew faster than its packaging did. What cultivators actually need from bins and pallets, why wood is complicated, and where the compliance edges are.
The 48x40 is sixty years old. Is it still the right pallet?
A footprint designed around 1960s grocery shelving and trailer widths now carries a third of North American freight. It has flaws, it has survived every challenger, and the reason is not inertia.
Backhaul pairing, and how we cut empty miles by 38%
A trailer that delivers to Greeley and comes back empty has burned 130 miles for nothing. Pairing deliveries with collections is the single biggest lever we have on both cost and carbon.
Pallet wood in furniture: what actually works
Most pallet furniture on the internet is badly made from the wrong boards. Here is which parts of a pallet are worth building with, which are not, and what the wood actually does after you take it indoors.
How we grade: a walk down the sort line
Eight hundred units an hour, four decisions each, one person making them. Everything else in this yard is downstream of what happens in the first twelve feet.
Where Euro pallets go to die in America
The best-built pallet in the world arrives in Denver on a container and then has nowhere to go. There is no exchange pool here, it fits nothing, and most of it ends up stacked behind a warehouse.
Forecasting pallets: the unglamorous spreadsheet that saves real money
Four columns and a monthly update. Customers who send us one pay roughly 14% less per pallet and never have a stockout, and the reason is not a discount.
Every load we photographed last year, and why
Nineteen hundred trailers, photographed before the doors closed. It takes ninety seconds, it has settled every dispute we have had, and it is the cheapest trust-building exercise in the business.
Cold chain pallets and the thing nobody checks
A pallet that goes from a −20 °C freezer into a humid loading dock does something specific, repeatedly, until it fails. Almost no cold-chain operation is measuring it.
The economics of the repair line, in full
We have never seen another yard publish these numbers, so here are ours: what a repair costs, what it earns, and why the environmental case and the commercial case are the same case.
Racking failures we have been called out to look at
Four incidents, none of them ours, all of them investigated because somebody wanted to know whether the pallet was at fault. In three cases it was — and in all three the warning signs were visible beforehand.
Six questions to ask any pallet supplier, including us
Pallet grades are not legally defined, which means a supplier's grade is a promise rather than a standard. Six questions establish whether the promise is worth anything.
What the drought did to our mulch line
Two dry summers turned the least important product in the yard into the one with a waiting list. What Colorado's water restrictions did to demand for ground pallet fibre.
Building a half pallet out of a dead one
A 48x40 with a broken stringer is scrap. Cut it down the middle and it is two retail display bases worth more than the original pallet. This is the least understood part of a pallet yard.
A field guide to the IPPC stamp
Four elements, fixed positions, and about twenty seconds of learning. Once you can read an IPPC mark you can audit your own inbound freight from across a warehouse.
Why we don't buy blue pallets
Pooled pallets belong to somebody else. Buying them is receiving stolen property in a blue coat, and every legitimate yard in the country knows it.
Nails: the quiet economics of ninety tonnes of steel
Every 48x40 pallet holds about a pound of steel. Across our intake that is ninety tonnes a year, and what happens to it decides whether our mulch is playground-grade or landfill.
The hidden cost of Grade A on a warehouse floor
More than half the over-specification we see is Grade A bought for jobs Grade B does identically. On 2,000 pallets a year that habit costs about seven thousand dollars.
What a skip really costs you
A roll-off is the default answer for accumulated pallets in almost every facility, and it is almost always the most expensive option available. Here is the arithmetic, including the parts that never reach a P&L.
Pinwheeling: the free fifteen per cent in your trailer
Rotating alternate rows of pallets ninety degrees turns twenty-six floor positions into thirty. It costs nothing, takes a minute longer to load, and most operations have never tried it.
How Colorado breweries broke our 36-inch square supply
The 36-inch keg square is a rounding error nationally and a constant headache in Colorado. What happens when a state's signature industry standardises on a footprint nobody else uses.
Nine ways a pallet dies
After a decade on a repair line you stop seeing individual broken pallets and start seeing nine recurring stories. Seven of them are fixable. Two are not, and telling them apart quickly is the whole job.
The lumber spike, three years on: what it taught a recycler
In 2021 new pallet prices roughly doubled and lead times went to eleven weeks. Recycled stock became strategic overnight. Two years later, here is what actually stuck.
Reading a pallet like a mechanic reads an engine
A used pallet carries its whole history on its surface: which way it was forked, how it was stacked, what it carried, and how close it is to finished. Once you can read it, grading takes four seconds.
Why we weigh every trailer twice
A full trailer of wet hardwood pallets can reach an axle limit before it reaches the roof. Two weighings and a ten-minute habit have kept a lot of our customers out of a scale house conversation.
The day we stopped calling it waste wood
In 2014 we were paying a tipping fee to bury lumber we had just been paid to collect. Changing one word in how the yard talked about it changed the whole business.
What a thousand pallets actually look like in a Denver winter
Frozen stacks weigh forty per cent more, band badly and hide everything a grader needs to see. Here is what February actually does to a pallet yard, and what it should change about how you store yours.
Who writes this
Six people, one yard
Nothing here is ghostwritten. Every post is by somebody who does the job it describes, which is why the numbers are specific and occasionally unflattering.
Started RePallet Co. in 2009 with one flatbed and a rented half-acre off Smith Road. Still grades loads on Saturday mornings.
Runs the sort line and the intake gate. Has personally graded somewhere north of a million pallets and can call a Grade B from twenty feet.
Rebuilt the repair line into four stations in 2019. Believes most broken pallets are two boards away from another two years of work.
Plans the Front Range routes and is quietly responsible for the yard's fall in empty miles since 2019.
Built the Pallet Passport system and publishes the yard's carbon methodology, including the parts she is least confident about.
Runs the crating shop at the back of the yard. Has crated a CNC machining centre, a vintage Airstream axle and one taxidermied elk.
What the journal covers, and why it exists
Most industry blogs are a content-marketing obligation. This one started because arguments in the yard kept producing numbers nobody had written down, and it turned out customers wanted them.
| Category | What it covers | Written by |
|---|---|---|
| Yard notes | Grading, repair, inspection, how the work is actually done | Marisol, Ben, Darnell |
| Buying & selling | Pricing, grades, procurement, market movements | Darnell, Marisol |
| Sustainability | Recycling economics, carbon accounting, circularity | Inés, Ben |
| Logistics | Routing, loading, weights, freight economics | Tova |
| Standards & compliance | ISPM 15, racking safety, pooled pallets | Inés, Ben, Darnell |
| Materials & making | Timber, fasteners, crating, remanufacture | Wes, Ben |
| Colorado | Brewery, agriculture, cannabis and weather-specific pieces | Marisol, Tova, Inés |
The posts people send to their colleagues
The economics of the repair line
Every cost and margin in a pallet repair operation, published in full. We have never seen another yard do it.
Open02What our carbon numbers would look like if we cheated
Five legitimate-looking accounting choices that would quadruple our headline, and why we took none of them.
Open03Nine ways a pallet dies
The failure modes that account for almost everything, with causes, costs and which are preventable.
Open04What a skip really costs you
The arithmetic on 150 pallets, including the costs that never reach a spreadsheet.
Open05A pallet's résumé: seven lives
One stencilled pallet followed from 2017 to 2024, through seven owners and four repairs.
Open06Six questions to ask any pallet supplier
Written to be used on us. If we ever fail one, hold us to it.
OpenHow to use this if you work with pallets
- If you are buying: read the pricing review and the grade pieces before your next quote. They are worth more than a negotiation.
- If you are selling: read the winterising and buyback pieces. Both are worth about a dollar a unit for an hour of work.
- If you are automating: read the Grade B piece. It is the most expensive thing on this site to get wrong.
- If you are reporting: read the carbon methodology piece and then ask your current recycler the six questions in it.
- If you run a dock: print the inspection and buyback checklists. They are designed for a wall, not a screen.
- If you disagree with something: tell us. Being corrected by a customer is embarrassing for an afternoon and useful for years.
There is no newsletter, no gate and no download form. Everything is on the page, and the questions that arrive twice become the next post.
Have a question we have not written about?
Send it. We answer in writing within one business day, and the questions that come up twice become posts.