Sustainability
What our carbon numbers would look like if we cheated
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Our published figure is 893 tonnes of CO₂e avoided last year. With five defensible changes to the methodology it could be 3,400, and nobody could call it a lie.
Carbon accounting in packaging is not fraud-prone so much as it is choice-prone. Most of the headline figures in this industry differ from each other because of methodology, not because of performance. I want to show you the choices we faced and which way we went.
Cheat one: count sequestration
A wooden pallet is roughly 50% carbon by dry mass. A 48x40 hardwood pallet holds about 7.5 kg of carbon, equivalent to 27.5 kg of CO₂. Across 186,000 pallets that is 5,115 tonnes of CO₂ “stored” in our inventory.
What we do: nothing. We do not count it. Sequestration in a product with a finite life is contested accounting — the carbon is released when the wood eventually decays or burns, and the timing benefit is real but much smaller than the gross number implies. Including it would be the single largest inflation available and it would be indefensible.
Cheat two: pick a flattering baseline
| Assumed counterfactual | kg CO₂e per pallet | Our annual total |
|---|---|---|
| New hardwood 48x40 (what we use) | 4.8 | 893 t |
| New softwood 48x40 | 3.6 | 670 t |
| New plastic pallet | 22.0 | 4,092 t |
| New pallet + landfill of the old one | 6.9 | 1,283 t |
| Virgin timber including harvest transport | 5.9 | 1,097 t |
What we do: we use the new hardwood figure, 4.8 kg, because for most of our customers that genuinely is the alternative. Using the plastic counterfactual would more than quadruple our number and would be true for perhaps two per cent of our volume.
Cheat three: do not net your own freight
Collecting and delivering pallets burns diesel. Last year our fleet emitted 341 tonnes of CO₂. Many published recycler figures are gross avoided emissions with no transport netting at all.
What we do: net it. The 893 tonne figure is after subtracting our own fleet emissions. Reporting gross would give us 1,234 tonnes, a 38% improvement for the price of a footnote nobody reads.
Cheat four: claim avoided landfill methane
Wood in an anaerobic landfill decomposes slowly and produces methane, which has a global warming potential around 28 times CO₂ over a century. There are published factors that would let us claim 0.4 to 1.1 tonnes CO₂e per tonne of wood diverted. Across 2,900 tonnes of wood that is somewhere between 1,160 and 3,190 tonnes.
What we do: not claim it. Two reasons. Wood decomposes very slowly in modern lined landfills, and many capture the gas. And more importantly, most of the pallets we collect were not going to a landfill — they were going to another recycler. Claiming diversion credit for material that would have been diverted anyway is the most common inflation in this industry.
Cheat five: allocate generously
When we recover a board from a dismantled pallet and use it to repair another pallet, we could count the full avoided-manufacture benefit of the repaired pallet and separately count the recovered lumber as a recycled-content credit. That is double counting dressed as thoroughness.
What we do: count it once, at the point of the repair, and value reclaimed lumber at its alternative sale value rather than at zero in the repair cost.
The full reconciliation
| Choice | Would add | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Our published figure | — | 893 t |
| + Gross rather than net of freight | +341 t | 1,234 t |
| + Avoided landfill methane (mid) | +1,450 t | 2,684 t |
| + Virgin timber baseline | +204 t | 2,888 t |
| + Generous allocation | +480 t | 3,368 t |
| + Sequestration (not shown, indefensible) | +5,115 t | 8,483 t |
Why bother
Because the number is only useful if it is comparable, and it is only comparable if the method is published. A customer putting our figure into their own reporting is taking on our methodology whether they know it or not, and they deserve to know what they are taking on.
And because the first four choices are all made, routinely, by operators in this industry who are not lying and would be genuinely surprised to be challenged. If you are comparing recyclers on carbon, compare methodologies. The performance differences between us are much smaller than the accounting differences.