Inside the yard

One trailer, nine stations, about four hours.

This page exists because 'we recycle pallets' is not a description of anything. Here is what actually happens to a load between the moment it crosses our scale and the moment its wood leaves as something else.

Warehouse interior with pallets sorted by type — natural wood, blue pooled units, black plastic and EPAL stamped stacks — SegregationSorted by type, not by convenience. Pooled units go back to the pool; plastic runs a separate stream entirely.

Want to see it in person?

We give yard tours to customers and to anyone auditing a diversion claim. Put 'yard tour' in the message and pick a morning.

Written quotes, usually inside one business day
Loads from 100 pallets to full 53' trailers
We buy as readily as we sell — tell us which way it flows

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We reply by email, so this needs to be a working address.

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US or Canadian 10-digit number. Formats itself as you type.

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US ZIP (43217) or Canadian postal code (K1A 0B1).

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Whole units, digits only.

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No phone number required from us — we quote by email so you have the numbers in writing.

Recycling yard with a steel bin full of broken pallet wood, a grinder conveyor, stacks of pallets and a forklift beyond

The last four per cent

Everything the sort deck rejected, on its way to the grinder. It leaves as mulch, bedding and boiler fibre — not as landfill.

Station by station

The nine places a pallet stops.

Times are for a typical 330-unit load of mixed 48×40 GMA on a weekday morning. A load of odd sizes takes considerably longer at station 03.

016 minutes
Inbound scale and visual
The trailer crosses the scale before anything is unloaded. Gross weight in, tare weight out, and the difference is the number every downstream figure is built on. While it weighs, a yard lead walks the load and flags anything obviously wrong: standing water, a chemical smell, MB stamps, or a footprint mix that will slow the sort deck down.
About one load in forty gets turned away at this point, almost always for moisture or contamination.
0225 minutes
Unload and stage
Two forklifts pull the load into staging lanes organised by footprint, not by customer. A 53-foot trailer of stacked GMA is roughly 330 units and takes about twenty-five minutes to strip if the stacks are square and banded. Loose, unbanded loads take twice that, which is why we ask you to band.
Loose loads add roughly $0.35 per unit in handling. It is the cheapest thing you can fix.
032.5 seconds per unit
The sort deck
Every pallet passes a grader. They look at four things in a fixed order: stringer integrity, deck board count and breaks, footprint accuracy, and moisture and staining. The unit goes into one of four lanes — reuse, repair, dismantle, grind — and that decision is not revisited downstream.
A good grader makes this call in under three seconds and is right well over 95% of the time. It takes about eight months to train.
0440 seconds per unit
Cleaning and squaring
Reuse-lane units get protruding nails set, loose boards re-nailed, banding and film residue removed, and a squareness check against a jig. Anything more than a quarter-inch out of square goes back to the repair lane, because out-of-square pallets are what jam racking.
This is the station that separates a graded pallet from a used one.
053–7 minutes per unit
The repair line
Broken members come off with a pallet buster and a pry bar. Replacements come from the recovered-lumber rack next to the station — full-length boards of matched nominal thickness, never short splices. Cracked stringers get a companion glued and nailed along the full face, or the unit is kicked to dismantling.
Roughly 40% of repair-lane units are repaired with lumber recovered from other pallets on the same day.
0690 seconds per unit
Dismantling
Units beyond economic repair go through a dismantler that separates deck boards from stringers with minimal splitting. Good boards go to the recovered-lumber rack; stringers get cut down for shorter footprints. What comes off here is the raw material for station 05, which is the loop that makes the economics work.
27% of intake by weight leaves this station as lumber rather than as a pallet.
07Batch
Remill and rebuild
Recovered stringers get docked to length and resawn where needed, then fed to the build line alongside recovered deck boards. This is where remanufactured pallets are born — orphan footprints converted into 48×40 GMA units that anyone will buy.
A remanufactured GMA is typically a five-board deck rather than seven, and grades as B.
08Continuous
Grinding, magnets and screening
Everything left goes through a horizontal grinder. The output crosses a magnetic separator that pulls nails and banding, then a screening deck that splits the stream into landscape mulch, animal bedding and boiler fibre by particle size. Coloured mulch gets dyed on a second pass.
Ferrous recovery runs about 0.4% of intake weight and goes to a scrap processor.
0920 minutes
Outbound and the ticket
Graded stock is banded in stacks of 15 and loaded. The count sheet, grade certificate and — for program customers — the Pallet Passport are generated from the same records that started at the inbound scale. Every number on that document traces back to a weight, not an estimate.
The scale ticket at station 01 and the outbound records are what an auditor actually wants.

The bit that surprises people

Station 06 feeds station 05.

Most visitors assume the repair line runs on purchased lumber. It does not, and that single fact is what makes recycled pallets both cheap and genuinely low-carbon.

Pallets that are too far gone to repair are dismantled, and their sound boards become the replacement stock for pallets that can be saved. The wood never leaves the loop. A 48×40 GMA repaired here in March is very likely carrying a board that was cut in 2016 and spent nine years on a different pallet.

It also means our repair capacity is constrained by our dismantling volume rather than by lumber prices — which is why our repair pricing has been far more stable than the new-pallet market since 2021.

Rebuilt with recovered boards

Throughput

What the yard handles on a normal day.

Figures are 2025 averages for the Columbus yard, rounded.
Measure	Per day	Per year	Note
Pallets received	≈ 6,400	≈ 1.6 million	Across roughly 19 inbound trailers
Pallets shipped graded	≈ 3,700	≈ 925,000	Reuse plus repaired stock
Units dismantled	≈ 1,700	≈ 425,000	The source of all repair lumber
Wood ground	≈ 42 tons	≈ 10,500 tons	Mulch, bedding and boiler fibre
Ferrous recovered	≈ 0.7 tons	≈ 175 tons	Nails and banding to scrap
Landfilled	≈ 0.5 tons	≈ 125 tons	Treated and contaminated wood only

Why four hours matters

A load that sits is a load that gets wet, and wet wood loses a grade. Anything received before 1:00 PM is graded the same day. That timing discipline is worth more to the diversion rate than any piece of equipment in the yard.

What we still get wrong

Grading is a human judgement and humans have bad mornings. Our internal re-check audits about 2% of outbound stock and finds a mis-grade in roughly one unit in six hundred. We would like that number lower and we publish it because pretending it is zero would be nonsense.

Keep reading

This page is not linked from the main menu — it lives underneath pallet recycling for people who want the mechanics rather than the pitch.

One trailer, nine stations, about four hours.

Want to see it in person?

The nine places a pallet stops.

Inbound scale and visual

Unload and stage

The sort deck

Cleaning and squaring

The repair line

Dismantling

Remill and rebuild

Grinding, magnets and screening

Outbound and the ticket

Station 06 feeds station 05.

What the yard handles on a normal day.

Keep reading