Materials & making
Nails: the quiet economics of ninety tonnes of steel
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Nobody buys a pallet for its nails. Everybody who runs a pallet yard ends up thinking about them more than they expected.
A standard 48" x 40" GMA stringer pallet contains between 70 and 90 nails, weighing roughly 1.1 lb in total. Multiply by our 186,000 annual intake and the yard handles somewhere around ninety tonnes of steel a year that arrives embedded in wood.
The fastener decides the pallet's life
This is the part most buyers never consider and it has a larger effect on service life than species, grade or board thickness.
| Fastener | Withdrawal resistance | Shiner rate | Repairability | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Smooth-shank nail | Low | High | Poor — holes elongate | Cheap one-way pallets |
| Ring-shank (annular) | High | Very low | Good | The industry standard |
| Screw-shank (helical) | Very high | Negligible | Good | Heavy-duty and block pallets |
| Staples | Moderate | Moderate | Poor | Light-duty, display |
| Bolts | Highest | None | Excellent | Specialist skids |
A pallet built with smooth-shank nails will produce shiners for the rest of its life. Every thermal cycle, every load, every fork impact works the fastener a fraction further out. We mark those out of repair stock because the labour never ends — you shear the shiners, ship it, and it comes back with new ones.
Getting the steel back out
On the dismantling line, the band saw separates deck boards from stringers with the nails still in the wood. That is deliberate — cutting through the nail line is faster and does less damage to the board than prying it off.
- 1
Band-saw separation
Decks come off stringers. Nails stay in the boards.
- 2
De-nailing
Boards destined for resale are de-nailed by hand and by pneumatic puller.
- 3
Metal detection
Every board sold as lumber passes a detector. One missed nail destroys a planer blade, and the customer's opinion of us.
- 4
Pre-grind magnet
Loose fasteners pulled from the feedstock before the hammer mill.
- 5
Post-grind magnet
Overhead magnet across the chip stream. This is the one that decides whether fibre is playground-grade.
The numbers
Only 14 tonnes is recovered as scrap because most of the steel never needs to leave — it stays in boards that go straight back onto the repair line with the fasteners in place. That is a feature. Pulling a nail out of a sound board to sell for scrap and then driving a new nail back in would be a remarkably stupid way to run a yard.
Why it decides the mulch grade
Ground wood fibre with ferrous contamination cannot be sold as playground surfacing, cannot be used as animal bedding, and is a hazard in a landscape bed. The magnet is therefore not an environmental nicety — it is the difference between a product worth $24 a cubic yard and a product nobody will take.
It is also why we are strict about feedstock at the gate. Staples, banding, strapping seals and the occasional forgotten screwdriver all end up in the same stream, and the detector does not care which one ruined the batch.
One thing you can do
If you are returning pallets to any recycler, pull the banding and the strapping seals off first. It takes seconds per pallet, it is the single most common contaminant we find, and it is the reason a load occasionally gets downgraded for handling.