The Environmental Impact of Throwing Away Pallets

Despite the growing recycling infrastructure, an estimated 150 million pallets still end up in US landfills annually. That represents roughly 15% of the pallets produced each year — and it's an enormous environmental and economic waste.

The wood in those landfilled pallets could have been reused, repaired, or at minimum converted to mulch, animal bedding, or biomass fuel. Instead, it occupies landfill space and decomposes slowly, releasing methane — a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year horizon.

The numbers are staggering. Those 150 million landfilled pallets contain approximately 1.5 billion board feet of lumber. To produce that much lumber from virgin timber would require harvesting roughly 5 million trees. Five million trees — thrown away in pallet form every single year.

Beyond the wood waste, there's the embedded energy to consider. Each pallet represents the energy used in logging, milling, transporting, and assembling the lumber. When a pallet goes to the landfill, all of that embodied energy is wasted with no recovery.

California has been more aggressive than most states in addressing this issue. CalRecycle regulations require businesses generating significant volumes of organic waste (including wood) to arrange for recycling or composting. Landfill tipping fees in California are among the highest in the nation, creating an economic incentive to divert pallets from the waste stream.

The solution is straightforward: every pallet that can be reused should be reused. Every pallet that can't be reused should be recycled — into repaired pallets, mulch, animal bedding, or biomass. Only pallets that are contaminated beyond remediation should be landfilled, and that percentage should be in the single digits.

At Bakersfield Pallet Co., our landfill diversion rate exceeds 95%. Of the pallets we receive, the vast majority are repaired and resold. Those that can't be repaired are dismantled for usable lumber or ground into mulch. We're committed to closing the loop and keeping pallets out of the ground.