Sustainability

A pallet is a carbon store that happens to have a job.

Wood is about half carbon by dry weight. A 45-pound hardwood pallet holds roughly ten kilograms of carbon that came out of the atmosphere while a tree was standing. Everything we do is an argument for keeping it there a bit longer.

A single tall stack of mixed used pallets standing on a warehouse floor with a forklift and daylight beyond — One stackFifteen high and square. A stack that leans is a stack somebody has to touch twice.

Put numbers against your own volumes

Tell us your annual pallet volume and we will send back the diversion and carbon figures for your specific operation, with the assumptions attached.

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

Outdoor yard in bright sunshine with tall stacks of clean EPAL-stamped pallets beside a Shipping and Receiving door under a clear blue sky

Outbound

Banded, counted and staged against the door. Stacks of fifteen, double-banded, the way a forklift expects them.

There is a great deal of nonsense written about sustainability in this industry, most of it consisting of adjectives. We have tried to take the opposite approach: state the arithmetic, publish the assumptions, and let you check it against your own volumes.

The underlying logic is not complicated. Harvesting, milling and drying lumber is energy-intensive; moving a used pallet forty miles and replacing one board is not. The gap between those two is where the entire environmental case for this business sits, and it is large enough that you do not need to be clever with the numbers to make it work.

What does require care is the waste hierarchy — the order in which you should prefer outcomes. Reuse beats repair, repair beats remanufacture, remanufacture beats grinding, and grinding beats landfill by an enormous margin. Our yard is organised around that order, not around whichever outcome is most convenient on a busy afternoon.

The hierarchy

Five outcomes, in strict order of preference.

Every pallet that enters the yard is pushed as far up this list as it will go. The cost of doing that properly is labour, which is why plenty of operations do not.

Step 01
Reuse as-is
Cleaned, squared, re-banded and back out. Roughly 34% of intake. The lowest-impact outcome available, by a wide margin.
≈ 0.4 kg CO₂e per unit.
Step 02
Repair with recovered lumber
Broken members replaced with boards recovered from units beyond saving. About 24% of intake. No new lumber enters the loop.
≈ 1.2 kg CO₂e per unit.
Step 03
Dismantle and remanufacture
Units past repair become the raw material for other repairs, or get rebuilt into standard footprints. 27% of intake by weight.
This is what makes step two possible.
Step 04
Grind to fibre
Wet, mouldy or splintered material becomes landscape mulch, animal bedding and boiler fuel. 14% of intake.
Still a product, still displacing a virgin material.
Step 05
Permitted disposal
Treated and contaminated wood we are not allowed to process. 0.6% of intake, and we publish it.
A stated zero here would be a warning sign.

Run the numbers

The Reclaim Index.

Our own tool, built so you can check the claim against your own volumes rather than taking a brochure's word for it.

The Reclaim Index

What does your pallet habit actually weigh?

Move the numbers. We’ll show what choosing reclaimed wood over freshly milled lumber does across a year.

Pallets per shipment500

255,000

Pallet footprint

How often

That’s 6,000 pallets over twelve months.

92.4

metric tons

CO₂e avoided

135.0

short tons

Kept out of landfill

554

trees

Standing timber spared

$57,000

per year

Not spent on new wood

144,000

board feet

Lumber not milled

256,667

car miles

Equivalent driving avoided

How we calculate this →

Where the numbers come from

The coefficients, stated plainly.

These are the figures the Reclaim Index uses. Each is sourced and dated on the [methodology page](/sustainability/carbon-methodology).

Where a range exists, we use the conservative end — the one least flattering to us.
Quantity	Value used	Basis	Confidence
Avoided CO₂e per reused 48×40	15.4 kg	Cradle-to-gate emissions of an equivalent new pallet	Medium — published LCAs range 10–20 kg
Board feet per new 48×40	24 bf	Standard GMA construction, nominal dimensions	High
Board feet per sawlog tree	260 bf	Mid-range for a mature hardwood sawlog	Low — varies enormously by stand
Weight, recycled 48×40	45 lb	Our own scale data, 2025 average	High
Carbon content of dry wood	≈ 50%	Widely accepted figure across forestry literature	High
Emissions of recycled unit	1.2 kg CO₂e	Our collection, sorting and repair energy, 2025	Medium
Car miles per kg CO₂e	2.78 mi	0.36 kg CO₂e per passenger-vehicle mile	Medium

Measured

2025, by the scale.

99.4%

Diversion by weight

Of all wood entering the yard in 2025.

41k tons

Wood recovered

Across the last three calendar years.

78 mi

Median collection radius

Short hauls keep the carbon honest.

0.6%

Landfilled

Treated and contaminated wood only.

What we do not claim

We do not claim carbon neutrality, we do not buy offsets, and we do not describe our mulch as carbon sequestration. Ground wood on a garden bed decomposes and releases its carbon over a few years; calling that sequestration would be dishonest, and the industry does it constantly.

What we are working on

The 0.6% is the hard part and we have no credible plan to reduce it without simply refusing difficult material, which would move the problem rather than solve it. The more tractable target is our own diesel: fixed lanes have cut empty running substantially and there is more to get.

Go deeper

Three pages that show the working.

Interactive tool01

A pallet is a carbon store that happens to have a job.

Put numbers against your own volumes

Five outcomes, in strict order of preference.

Reuse as-is

Repair with recovered lumber

Dismantle and remanufacture

Grind to fibre

Permitted disposal

The Reclaim Index.

What does your pallet habit actually weigh?

The coefficients, stated plainly.

2025, by the scale.

Three pages that show the working.

The Reclaim Index

Carbon methodology

Zero-waste promise

Keep reading