Buying & selling
What a skip really costs you
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The reason skips win is organisational, not financial. Waste disposal is a facilities line item; pallets are an operations problem. Nobody owns the comparison.
So let us own it. A 30-yard roll-off in the Denver metro costs between $450 and $700 delivered, hauled and tipped, depending on the contractor and the tonnage. Thrown loosely, it holds roughly 150 wooden pallets.
| Line | Roll-off skip | RePallet buyback |
|---|---|---|
| Container / haulage cost | −$575 | $0 |
| Revenue from the pallets | $0 | +$975 |
| Labour to load | 3.5 hrs of your team | Our driver |
| Labour cost at $28/hr loaded | −$98 | $0 |
| Yard space occupied during fill | 2–3 weeks | Hours |
| Landfill diverted | Unverified | 2.4 t, documented |
| Reporting produced | A weight ticket | Batch record with recovery split |
| Net | −$673 | +$975 |
The swing is $1,648 on a single 150-pallet load. For a distribution centre generating that much every fortnight, it is somewhere north of $42,000 a year of pure decision cost.
The costs that never reach a spreadsheet
- Fire code. Accumulated wooden pallets are one of the highest fuel-load materials in a warehouse. NFPA guidance is stricter about idle pallet storage than about almost anything else, and fire marshals in Denver do check.
- Pest harbourage. A stack sitting for six weeks behind a building is a rodent habitat, and in a food facility that is an audit finding.
- Yard congestion. The skip has to go somewhere, and it is usually somewhere a trailer wanted to turn.
- Employee time in fifteen-minute increments. Nobody logs the four minutes spent moving pallets so a truck can back in. It happens daily.
- The sustainability line you cannot write. You cannot report diversion you cannot evidence.
When a skip is genuinely the right answer
It is not never. There are three real cases, and we will tell you so rather than sell you a collection you should not have.
- Chemically contaminated wood. If a pallet has been in contact with a hazardous substance, it needs a licensed disposal route and we are not it.
- Fire-damaged material with melted plastic through it. The contamination is not separable and the fibre stream cannot take it.
- Genuinely tiny volumes in remote locations. If you generate eleven pallets a quarter in Craig, Colorado, the freight maths does not work and we will say so.
The objection we hear most
“Our pallets are broken, nobody wants them.” This is the most common and the most wrong. Broken pallets are the raw material for a repair line. We pay $0.75 to $1.75 for units that are genuinely beyond repair, and $2.25 to $4.50 for repairable ones. The floor is not zero; the floor is what a skip charges you, which is negative.
Making the switch without a project
- 1
Count one week
Rough count of what accumulates in seven days. That is the only data required.
- 2
Get one offer
Footprint, count, postcode, dock hours. One email.
- 3
Run one collection
See what the load actually grades at and what it pays.
- 4
Cancel the roll-off
Once, and permanently, when the first cheque clears.
We have done this with about ninety Front Range sites. The average time from first email to cancelled skip contract is eleven days, and nobody has gone back.