Guide · Recycling
What actually happens to a pallet at a recycling yard
Most explanations of pallet recycling stop at "we grind them into mulch". That is the last three per cent. Here is the other ninety-seven.
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Pallet recycling is a sorting problem before it is a processing problem. Incoming cores are graded, then routed to reuse (about 46%), repair (31%), remanufacture (12%), lumber recovery (8%) or fibre and metal recovery (3%).
Every stage recovers less value than the one before it, which is why a well-run yard invests heavily in grading accuracy at the gate. Grinding a repairable pallet destroys roughly 23 board feet of usable lumber.
Station by station
- 1
Intake and weigh
The trailer crosses the scale, the load is photographed and a batch reference is opened. Everything downstream is tied to that number.
- 2
Grade sort
Every unit is handled individually. Sorters route to reuse, repair, remanufacture or dismantle. This is the highest-skill job in the yard.
- 3
Repair line
Four stations: board replacement, companion stringers, plugging and de-nailing. Roughly 31% of intake.
- 4
Remanufacture
Units cut down to smaller footprints — half pallets, skids, display bases — using their own lumber.
- 5
Dismantle
Band-saw separation of decks from stringers, with nails still in the boards.
- 6
De-nail and detect
Boards are de-nailed and passed through a metal detector. A single missed nail destroys a planer blade.
- 7
Grind and screen
What remains is hammer-milled, magnet-separated and screened into mulch, playground fibre and bedding.
Real yields from a real year
These are our own figures from last year across 186,000 incoming cores. They move with the season — winter intake is wetter and repairs more — but the shape is stable.
| Route | Share of intake | Units | Value recovered per unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reuse after inspection only | 46% | 85,560 | $7.20 – $12.40 |
| Repaired to Grade A or B | 31% | 57,660 | $5.40 – $9.80 |
| Remanufactured to another footprint | 12% | 22,320 | $4.10 – $8.00 |
| Lumber recovered for resale | 8% | 14,880 | $1.60 – $3.20 |
| Fibre, bedding and mulch | 3% | 5,580 | $0.35 – $0.80 |
| Landfilled | 0% | 0 | — |
The parts nobody photographs
Nails
A 48x40 pallet contains 70 to 90 nails weighing about 1.1 lb in total. Across our intake that is roughly 90 tonnes of steel a year, of which we recover about 14 tonnes as saleable ferrous scrap — the rest stays in boards that get reused with the nails still in them. Magnet separation happens twice: before grinding and after.
Moisture
Wood arriving from an outdoor stack can be 40% heavier than the same pallet dry. It grades worse, bands worse and grinds worse. Yards that buy by weight rather than by unit love wet pallets; yards that buy by unit, like ours, do not.
Stencils and paint
Painted stringer ends are an ownership mark, not decoration. Blue, red and brown painted blocks usually indicate pool property. Any recycler worth using pulls those out and returns them rather than grinding someone else's asset.
The rejection pile
Every yard has one, and an honest yard will show it to you: mould-bloomed pallets, chemical-stained units, MB-stamped wood and anything with a live infestation. Ours goes to licensed disposal, which is the one and only wood stream we do not recover — and we count and publish it.
What this means for your own reporting
If you are writing a sustainability report, the useful number is not "we recycled our pallets". It is the disposition split — how much was reused, repaired, recovered and ground — because those have very different footprints. A recycler who cannot give you that split is giving you a weight ticket and calling it data.
- Ask for the disposition split, not just the tonnage
- Ask what percentage went to landfill, and whether that number is audited
- Ask what carbon factor they use and where it comes from
- Ask whether pooled pallets were returned or processed
- Ask for a batch-level record you can cite, not an annual summary
Ours is on the Pallet Passport page, and the factors are documented on carbon methodology.
The equipment, and what each machine is for
| Machine | Job | Throughput | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weighbridge | Intake and dispatch weights | Every load | Every downstream figure ties to it |
| Band-saw dismantler | Separates decks from stringers | 60 – 90 units/hr | Cuts through nails rather than prying |
| Pneumatic de-nailer | Removes fasteners from boards | 300 – 500 boards/hr | Turns waste into saleable lumber |
| Metal detector | Catches missed fasteners | Every board sold | One nail destroys a planer knife |
| Nailing guns / jigs | Repair and rebuild | 40 – 90 sec per repair | The profit centre |
| Re-squaring jig | Corrects racked pallets | 60 – 90 sec | Cheap fix for a common fault |
| Hammer mill | Grinds residual wood | 4 – 8 t/hr | The last resort, deliberately small |
| Overhead magnet | Separates ferrous from fibre | Continuous | Decides whether fibre is saleable |
| Trommel / deck screen | Sizes the fibre | Continuous | Produces three grades from one stream |
| Colour tumbler | Applies pigment to mulch | Batch | Raises value without more grinding |
Why recovery rates vary so much between yards
Published recovery figures in this industry range from about 60% reuse to about 15%, on nominally similar intake. The variation is almost entirely explained by four things.
- Sort accuracy at intake. A yard that mis-sorts 8% of repairable pallets to the grinder destroys roughly nine dollars of value on each one. Ours runs at 1.4%.
- Repair capacity. You can only route to repair if you have a line that can absorb the volume. Yards without one grind by default and call it recycling.
- Local core quality. A yard fed by a grocery distribution corridor receives better cores than one fed by construction sites. Ours is the former, and we should not take credit for geography.
- Whether the fibre line is a profit centre. If grinding makes money, there is an incentive to grind. Ours loses about 87 cents a unit before overhead, which keeps the incentive pointing the right way.
| Reuse-first yard | Balanced yard | Grind-led yard | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reused as-is | 460 | 380 | 210 |
| Repaired | 310 | 240 | 90 |
| Remanufactured | 120 | 60 | 0 |
| Lumber recovered | 80 | 140 | 180 |
| Ground to fibre | 30 | 140 | 480 |
| Landfilled | 0 | 40 | 40 |
| Value recovered | $8,940 | $6,120 | $3,410 |
| CO₂e avoided | 4.3 t | 3.0 t | 1.4 t |
Three yards, identical input, and the difference between the first and the last is 5,530 dollars and 2.9 tonnes of carbon on a thousand pallets. When you compare recyclers, this is the comparison that matters.
What happens to everything that is not wood
A pallet is mostly timber and not entirely timber. The rest has to go somewhere, and where it goes is a fair test of whether a zero-landfill claim is real.
| Material | Source | Annual volume | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ferrous fasteners | Nails, staples, seals | ≈ 14 t | Colorado scrap smelter |
| Steel banding | Incoming loads | ≈ 2 t | Same smelter |
| Poly strapping | Incoming loads | ≈ 0.6 t | Plastics recycler |
| Shrink film | Incoming loads | ≈ 1.1 t | LDPE film recycler |
| Plastic pallets, cracked | Intake | ≈ 4 t | Resin regrind processor |
| Labels and paper | Deck surfaces | Small | Removed before grinding; mixed paper |
| Rejected timber | MB, CCA, contaminated | ≈ 6 t | Licensed disposal — the one stream we do not recover |
That last row is published deliberately. Six tonnes a year of material we are not permitted to recover goes to licensed disposal at our cost. Our zero-landfill claim covers the wood stream and we say which stream it covers, because a claim without a boundary is not a claim.
Questions people actually ask
How many times can a pallet be recycled?
What percentage of pallets are actually recycled?
Is grinding pallets into mulch good or bad?
What happens to the nails?
Can pallets be composted?
How much of a pallet is actually recoverable?
Is grinding pallets bad?
How long does a pallet spend in the yard?
Can pallet wood be composted?
What does a recycler do in a downturn?
Let's keep your pallets in the loop
Whether you have 40 broken cores behind the dock or need 4,000 Grade A pallets a month, the conversation starts the same way.