Passport PR-4821-0067 came off a dairy distribution dock in Harrisonburg in March 2019 as part of a mixed load of about four hundred platforms. It was a standard 7/5 GMA stringer pallet in southern yellow pine, grade B at arrival, with a cracked lead board and a stringer plugged by somebody before us.
It left the yard for the fourth and final time in June 2026. This is the whole record, because it is the most concrete answer we can give to the question of what reuse actually means.
Life one: the one we did not see
Unknown. It arrived with an existing stringer plug, which means somebody had already repaired it at least once before 2019, so our count of four lives is conservative. Its original build was probably 2015 or 2016 judging by the weathering and the fastener pattern. The first life is a gap in the record and we would rather state that than estimate it.
Life two: 2019 to 2021, grocery inbound
We replaced one lead board, re-nailed two deck joints, re-graded it B, and released it to a regional grocery distributor. It ran inbound produce lanes for roughly two years and came back in November 2021 with a second cracked lead board and moisture staining on the bottom deck from outdoor storage.
Life three: 2021 to 2024, plant internal
Two deck boards replaced, the stained bottom boards left in place because the staining was blue stain rather than decay. Re-graded B. Sold into a plant-internal programme at a beverage facility in Petersburg, where it spent two and a half years moving between a filling line and a warehouse — the gentlest work a pallet ever gets. It returned in April 2024 in better condition than it left.
Life four: 2024 to 2026, agricultural seasonal
Stamped with its passport number in 2024 when we started the programme, which is why the later record is precise and the earlier record is reconstructed. One stringer plated, three boards replaced, re-graded B. Sold to a seed co-op on the Eastern Shore for two harvest seasons under collars.
The end
It came back in June 2026 with a stringer broken through at the notch, below the plate, and two bottom boards soft to a thumbnail. That is decay, not staining, and a platform with decayed members cannot honestly be repaired. It was dismantled: eleven boards went to the repair stock pile, the fasteners and the plate went to a scrap recycler, and the remainder was ground into natural mulch.
The ledger
- Approximately eleven years in service across at least four lives.
- Three new pallets displaced — the three it did not have to be replaced by. Conservatively, around 72 kg CO₂e of avoided manufacture.
- About 111 board feet of lumber not harvested, three platforms' worth at roughly 37 board feet each.
- Around 120 lb of wood kept out of landfill, and out of anaerobic methane generation.
- Nine boards and one stringer plug consumed in repairs, which is the honest cost side of that ledger.
- Eleven boards recovered at dismantling, which went on to repair other platforms.
- Zero pounds to landfill.
Why we bothered to write it down
Because aggregate statistics are easy to disbelieve and a single object is not. Our yard-level figures — 94.2% returned to service, 3,910 tonnes of CO₂e avoided — are reconciled from weighbridge tickets and we stand behind them, but they are abstractions. One pallet, eleven years, four lives, two counties, a documented repair history and a pile of mulch at the end is the same argument in a form you can hold.
There are around 186,000 of these a year passing through four acres of gravel in Richmond. That is the business.
What the record cannot tell you
Three gaps, stated because a case study with no acknowledged gaps is a marketing document.
The first life is reconstructed, not recorded. It arrived in 2019 with an existing stringer plug, which means somebody repaired it before us, but we do not know who, when, or how many cycles it had already done. Our count of four lives is a floor rather than a figure.
The second gap is what it carried. We know the lanes — grocery inbound, plant-internal, agricultural seasonal — because we know who we sold it to. We do not know the loads, the handling intensity or how it was stored between uses, and all three of those drove its lifespan more than anything we did at the bench.
The third is the counterfactual. We say three new platforms were displaced. Strictly, three platform-purchases did not happen at three customers; whether that reduced manufacture somewhere by exactly three is an assumption about a market, not an observation about a pallet.
The repair cost side of the ledger
Nine boards and one stringer plug over seven years, plus roughly fifty fasteners, one steel plate, and three passes through the bench at a few minutes each. Those have a footprint we include in the 3.1 kg per-recovery figure and cannot measure precisely at the level of one object.
We mention it because reuse is routinely presented as free, and it is not. It is cheap — roughly an eighth of the emissions of manufacture — and the difference between cheap and free is the sort of thing that erodes trust when somebody notices it later.
Why one object beats a statistic
Our yard-level figures are reconciled from weighbridge tickets and we stand behind them: 186,400 platforms recovered last year, 94.2% returned to service, 3,910 tonnes of CO₂e avoided, zero to landfill since December 2016. They are also abstractions, and abstractions invite scepticism that a specific object does not.
PR-4821-0067 was a thing. It came off a dock in Harrisonburg, carried produce for two years, moved between a filling line and a warehouse for two and a half, sat under collars on the Eastern Shore for two harvests, and ended as mulch and a pile of recovered boards. Eleven years, two counties, nine replacement boards, one stringer plate, zero pounds buried.
The thing we would like you to take from it
Not the numbers. The ordinariness. There was nothing special about this platform — it was grade B softwood with a repair already on it when we met it, which describes most of what passes through here. The four lives were not the product of anything clever; they were the product of somebody looking at it four times and choosing repair over replacement.
There are around 186,000 of these a year passing through four acres of gravel in Richmond, and the entire business is that choice, made over and over, by people with a nail gun.
Dale, repair lead · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published August 11, 2026 · 1,111 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.