01Tier one: the pallet that needs nothing
The most common outcome surprises people. Roughly 41% of the pallets that arrive at our yard require no repair whatsoever. They are structurally intact, square, free of protruding fasteners, and were simply surplus at the place they came from.
This is the entire economic engine of the industry. A business that has no use for a pallet is standing next to an asset worth four to six dollars to somebody twenty miles away. The only thing between those two facts is a truck and a phone call.
These pallets are graded, stacked and shipped. The carbon cost is the transport and the handling — somewhere between 0.4 and 0.8 kg CO₂e. A new pallet built to replace it would have cost 11 to 18 kg.
02Tier two: ninety seconds of skilled work
About 34% of intake needs a repair. In practice that means a lead board pried off and replaced, a companion stringer nailed alongside a crack, or a notch plugged. On a well-run repair line this is roughly ninety seconds of a skilled person's time.
The economics here are the most favourable in the whole business. Around three dollars of labour and materials returns an asset worth eleven to sixteen dollars to service. It is also, by a wide margin, the lowest-carbon way to put a pallet into a supply chain.
03Tier three: taking it apart to build something else
About 11% of intake is dismantled and rebuilt. A pallet with two cracked stringers and eight good deck boards is not worth repairing, but those eight boards are worth having. They become the replacement boards used in tier two, or they become a remanufactured pallet in a size that nobody makes new any more.
This is where most odd-size pallets in circulation come from. A 45x45 or a 44x48 rarely gets built from fresh lumber in small quantities; it gets assembled from recovered components. That is also why odd sizes have such poor resale value — see custom sizes for why that matters before you commit to one.
04Tier four and five: fibre and, last, fuel
About 6% becomes fibre. The pallet goes through a primary grind, overband magnets lift the ferrous metal, a secondary grind sizes it, a second magnetic pass catches fragments the first grind had buried, and screening sorts it into products.
| Product | Goes to | What happens to the carbon |
|---|---|---|
| Landscape mulch | Landscapers, municipalities | Sequestered, released slowly over years |
| Animal bedding | Equine, poultry, dairy | Sequestered, then composted |
| Panel feedstock | Particleboard and MDF mills | Locked into a product for decades |
| Biomass fuel | Industrial boilers | Released immediately — last resort |
Under 1% goes to energy recovery. We treat that as a failure state rather than a product line, because burning wood ends its carbon storage. A pallet that becomes fuel is a pallet nobody could find a better use for.
05The 8% we do not divert, and why we publish it
Eight percent of what enters our yard by weight does not get diverted. It is contaminated wood — chemical spills, unidentified residues — plus material with embedded metal beyond economic extraction and anything that fails safety screening.
We report that number because a diversion rate you can trust is worth more than one that flatters us. Any recycler claiming 100% is either counting energy recovery as recycling or not counting carefully. When an auditor asks us where the boundary sits between measurement and estimate, we can point at it.
- Reused with no repair
- 41%Reused with no repair
- Repaired and returned to service
- 34%Repaired and returned to service
- Genuine residual, reported not rounded
- 8%Genuine residual, reported not rounded
06Why landfill is the worst outcome by a distance
Wood in a landfill does not simply sit there. It decomposes anaerobically — without oxygen — and that process generates methane rather than carbon dioxide. Methane is roughly 28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas over a hundred-year horizon.
So a landfilled pallet does not just fail to help. It actively emits 9 to 14 kg CO₂e that would not have been emitted had the same wood been ground into mulch, where the carbon releases slowly and aerobically. That gap is the single largest number in pallet sustainability, and it is the one least often mentioned.
You can run your own volumes through the impact calculator — it shows the arithmetic rather than hiding it behind a badge.
