01The economics of an empty trailer
A truck that delivers 540 pallets to your dock has to go somewhere afterwards. Fuel, driver hours, tolls and equipment wear accrue on the return leg whether or not there is anything in the trailer. Somebody pays for those miles, and in a dedicated delivery that somebody is you.
Now suppose the same truck collects cores from a site twenty miles from yours before heading home. That return leg now earns revenue. The carrier can price the outbound leg lower because the round trip is profitable, and your rate falls — often by 15 to 30% on a spot lane.
- Typical lane saving from a paired backhaul
- 15–30%Typical lane saving from a paired backhaul
- Freight share of a recycled pallet's landed cost
- 30–50%Freight share of a recycled pallet's landed cost
- Extra cost to you for mentioning your empties
- 0Extra cost to you for mentioning your empties
02Why this is an information problem
We check for backhaul pairings on every quote over a trailer. The limit is not willingness or capability — it is that we can only pair what we know exists.
The most common missed pairing is embarrassingly simple: a customer who buys pallets from us and also generates empty pallets at the same site, and has never mentioned the second half because they did not think of it as related. The same truck could do both legs. Instead we deliver, drive home empty, and a different truck collects from them next month.
“They had been buying from us for two years. It came up in conversation that they were paying someone else to haul away 300 pallets a month from the same building.”
03What to tell your supplier
- Do you generate empties? How many, how often, what sizes, what condition. Even damaged stock has value and a truck to fill.
- Where else do you ship or receive? Sister sites, customers, suppliers within a hundred miles are all potential pairings.
- How flexible is your receiving window? A truck that can arrive at 5am is worth more to a router than one that must arrive at 10.
- Can you take a trailer drop? This removes despatch cost entirely and is the cheapest freight there is.
- Are you willing to be on a scheduled day? Fixed-day routing lets a router build density around you.
04Where this shows up hardest
In dense markets — Dallas–Fort Worth, Atlanta, northern New Jersey — almost nothing is a dead-head. There is always something to collect on the way back, and pricing reflects that.
In isolated markets it is the whole game. Denver is five hundred miles from the nearest comparable metro. A one-off trailer over the Front Range prices badly because half of it is empty miles. Standing orders on a fixed release schedule run 15 to 20% cheaper there — a bigger gap than any other market we serve, and entirely a routing effect.
