The premise
A pallet is only waste for as long as nobody moves it
Roughly 41% of the pallets that arrive at our yard need no repair at all. They are structurally sound, square, free of protruding fasteners — and they were simply surplus at the place they came from. A business with no use for a pallet is standing next to an asset worth four to six dollars to somebody twenty miles away.
The only things between those two facts are a truck, a grading standard and someone willing to do both ends of the trade. Most companies in this industry do one: they sell pallets, or they haul them away, or they grind them. Every handoff between those functions adds a margin and an empty return mile, and both of those end up in the price you pay.
We do all six steps — collect, grade, repair, treat, supply, recover — because that is what makes the arithmetic work. It is not a philosophy. It is the reason a Grade B 48x40 costs what it costs.
Every illustration on this site is drawn geometry rather than stock photography. It loads instantly, scales to any screen, and shows the construction instead of a warehouse.
Company history
Sixteen years, including the parts that went wrong
- 2009Chapter 01
One trailer and a bad idea that turned out to be a good one
The company started because a warehouse manager in south Atlanta was paying $700 a month to have pallets taken away and a manufacturer eleven miles north was paying $14 each to have them delivered. We bought a used trailer and sat between those two facts. The whole business is still that arbitrage, just larger.
- 2011Chapter 02
The repair bench, which we badly under-rated
We started repairing rather than dismantling damaged stock, mostly because we ran short of sellable pallets one week. It took us years to understand that ninety seconds of skilled labour returning a $13 asset to service was not a cost centre — it was the core product.
- 2013Chapter 03
We bought a machine to do the grading
Vision systems, dimensional gates, the lot. It measured beautifully and could not find a hairline stringer crack. We shipped pallets that measured perfectly and failed in service, and it took most of a year to work out why. The grade call has been human ever since.
- 2014Chapter 04
First heat treatment chamber
Export customers kept asking and we kept subcontracting it. Owning the chamber meant owning the records, which turned out to matter far more than the margin — a treatment record you cannot produce is not a treatment record.
- 2016Chapter 05
The year chasing tonnage nearly ended us
We measured ourselves on volume recovered. Volume rewards taking every load, including the ones that are 70% unusable, on long lanes, from sites that cannot load. Our tonnage rose and our margin went to nothing. We replaced the metric with recoverable value per mile and the business was solvent again within two quarters.
- 2018Chapter 06
Routes instead of jobs
We stopped quoting deliveries and collections as separate events and started building them into paired routes. Backhaul pairing takes 15–30% out of a lane, and it costs nothing beyond knowing that the pairing exists. By the end of the year we were running scheduled days in six metros.
- 2020Chapter 07
Everything moved and nothing was predictable
Core supply collapsed as retail inventory froze, then whipsawed as it unfroze. We learned to hold buffer stock for customers rather than for ourselves, and to write price-adjustment mechanisms into agreements rather than leaving them to a conversation later.
- 2022Chapter 08
Fibre recovery brought in-house
Grinding, double magnetic separation and screening. We had been selling unsalvageable wood to a processor; bringing it in-house closed the last gap in the loop and let us report a diversion rate against our own weigh tickets rather than someone else's assurance.
- 2024Chapter 09
We published our grade criteria
Numeric, public, and uncomfortable. Grade A yield fell four points in the first quarter — that was the drift we had accumulated, made visible. Disputes dropped sharply, because an argument about a grade became a measurement rather than an opinion.
- 2026Chapter 10
Thirty-eight states, 4.1 million pallets
Twelve metros on scheduled route days, nine services under one roof, and a journal that now runs to thirty-two articles because writing something down once beats answering it fifty times.
How we operate
Four commitments that cost us money
- 01
Publish the number, including the one that doesn’t flatter us
Our diversion rate is 92%, not 100%. Our Grade A criteria are on the website with numbers in them. A figure you can interrogate is worth more than one you have to trust.
- 02
Sell the cheaper option when it’s the right one
Roughly a third of custom-pallet enquiries resolve into a standard footprint plus a two-dollar accessory. We say so. It costs us the order and earns the customer, which is the trade we prefer.
- 03
Grade twice, with two people
A grader who decided a pallet was repairable is invested in that decision. A second pair of eyes at the exit costs seconds and is why our reject rate on repeat accounts runs under 0.4%.
- 04
Everything in writing
No phone line, deliberately. Written requests do not get lost between the yard and the office, and both sides keep a record of what was agreed.
The masthead
Who writes here, and what they actually do
Dana Whitfield
Operations Director
Marcus Ellery
Yard & Grading Lead
Priya Raghunathan
Compliance Manager
Tom Okafor
Fleet & Logistics Manager
Lena Brandt
Sustainability Analyst
Ray Castellanos
Repair Shop Foreman
Where we are now
The current position
- Pallets recovered since 2009
- 4.1MPallets recovered since 2009
- Of intake diverted from landfill
- 92%Of intake diverted from landfill
- States on regular haul routes
- 38States on regular haul routes
- Tons of CO₂e avoided in 2025
- 26KTons of CO₂e avoided in 2025
Questions