Wood
deserves
a second
grain.
We buy, sell, repair, recycle and haul wooden pallets — and roughly nine out of ten platforms leaving our yard have already carried a load somewhere else. That is not a compromise. That is the entire point.
Start anywhere — this form reaches the yard
Selling surplus, buying a trailer load, or asking something odd about collars. One form, one human, one business day.
Four acres of gravel, and 186,000 platforms a year crossing it.
Everything we sell comes off this ground. Inbound cores on the left, graded stock on the right, and a sort line between them staffed by people who have done it for a decade.
Everything that happens to a pallet between first life and fourth.
Most companies do one end of this. We do the whole circle, which is the only way the environmental arithmetic actually works.
Six product families, one feedstock.
A pallet, a collar, a crate, a planter, a bag of mulch. Each one is further down the same board's life than the last.
Every rebuilt platform carries a passport.
Since 2024 we stamp a number into the outer stringer of each remanufactured pallet. It records where the wood came from, how many lives it has had, which boards we swapped and what that saved. Nobody else in the Mid-Atlantic does this. We think that is strange.
- Origin lane and recovery date
- Repair history, board by board
- Heat treatment batch reference
- Running CO₂e and landfill ledger
PR-4821-0067
- Lives so far
- 4 — 2 trips through our repair line
- First recovered
- Mar 2018
- Recovered from
- Beverage plant · Petersburg VA
- Lumber
- Appalachian mixed hardwood
- Current grade
- A / #1
- Boards swapped
- 4
- Typical lane
- Agricultural seasonal
- Next inspection due
- May 2027
Passport records are generated from the stamp on the platform. Any number you type resolves to a demonstration record — real customer passports are issued against your delivery lot and emailed with the packing list.
Fifteen footprints, and the reasons behind them.
Pallet sizing is not arbitrary — it comes from rail car widths, grocery shelf depths and the diameter of a 55-gallon drum. Our size library explains all of it.
| Footprint | Inches | Millimetres | Typically used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 48 × 40 GMA | 48" × 40" | 1219 × 1016 | Grocery, CPG, general freight |
| 42 × 42 | 42" × 42" | 1067 × 1067 | Telecom, paint, drums |
| 48 × 48 | 48" × 48" | 1219 × 1219 | Drums, chemicals |
| 40 × 48 | 40" × 48" | 1016 × 1219 | Construction, roofing |
| 48 × 42 | 48" × 42" | 1219 × 1067 | Chemical, beverage |
| 40 × 40 | 40" × 40" | 1016 × 1016 | Dairy, beverage |
How a broken pallet becomes a good one.
Nothing here is glamorous. It is a sort line, a nail gun, a band saw and a grinder — operated by people who have done it for a decade.
Recovery
Our truck arrives, often with an empty trailer to swap. We weigh, count and take everything — including the cores with no resale value.
Grading
Every platform passes a human eye. Footprint, stringer condition, deck coverage, moisture. It is sorted into repair, resale, or dismantle.
Repair
Boards swapped, stringers plugged or plated, joints re-nailed to the original pattern. Then re-graded as if it were new stock, because functionally it is.
Treatment
If it is going abroad it goes in the chamber: 56 °C at the core for thirty minutes, stamped, and logged against your shipment.
Remanufacture
Boards too short to repair become collars, crate sides, planters, risers and wall cladding on the millwork bench.
Fiber
Whatever is left is ground: landscape mulch, animal bedding, erosion fiber, boiler chip. This is the step that lets us say zero landfill and mean it.
Three of the six stages.
Recovery, grading and release. The other three — repair, treatment and fiber — happen indoors and photograph badly.
Different docks, different grades.
A brewery and a pharmaceutical packer both order 48 × 40. They should not be ordering the same pallet.
“The greenest pallet in the world is the one that already exists.”
It is painted on the wall of our repair shed in letters a foot high, and it is the only piece of corporate messaging anyone here has ever agreed on. Everything else — the fleet, the kiln, the grinder, the passport stamp — exists to make that sentence true more often.
Seventeen years of it
A trailer that arrives full should leave full too.
Backhaul matching has cut our empty miles by 31% since 2023 — a bigger carbon reduction than the grinder, the kiln and every other thing we have ever bought.
Long reads from people with splinters.
No listicles, no SEO filler. Specification, compliance, carbon arithmetic and the occasional argument.