Landfill diversion is the headline environmental statistic in waste-adjacent industries, and it is almost useless on its own. Here is the mechanism by which it misleads.
The grinder shortcut
Grinding wood is fast, mechanically simple and profitable. There is a ready market for mulch, bedding and biomass chip. A yard that puts every incoming platform straight through a tub grinder can truthfully report 100% diversion from landfill, zero waste to ground, and a lovely circular-economy narrative.
It has also destroyed every repairable pallet it received — and each of those would have displaced the manufacture of a new one, which is where almost all of the actual environmental benefit lives. Perfect diversion, substantial harm.
The metric that matters
Percentage of recovered platforms returned to service as platforms. Not diverted. Returned to service. Last year ours was 94.2%, with 5.8% dismantled or ground. We publish both numbers precisely because the second one is the one that can embarrass us: if it starts climbing, something has gone wrong with our sort line, not right with our mulch sales.
Why reuse beats recycling by so much
Reusing a platform skips harvest, milling, drying, fastening and inbound freight. Recycling it into mulch skips none of those for the next pallet — a new one still has to be built. Reuse displaces manufacture; recycling displaces only disposal. The waste hierarchy puts reduce and reuse above recycle for exactly this reason, and the hierarchy is right.
Four questions that cut through a diversion claim
- What percentage of what you collect goes back into service as the same product?
- How is that measured — a weighbridge, or an industry average applied to your tonnage?
- Is the share that could not be reused weighed and reported separately?
- How far does material travel to be recovered? Beyond a few hundred miles the whole case weakens.
The honest caveat on our own number
94.2% is a percentage of what we chose to accept. A yard can also flatter this figure by refusing badly damaged loads, leaving them to somebody else or to a dumpster. We take mixed loads including the cores with no resale value, and we haul them for less than a dumpster pull, because refusing them would make our statistics prettier and the world slightly worse.
If you want to test any recycler, including us, ask what they turn away. The answer says more than the percentage does.
How a 100% diversion rate can be the worst outcome in the room
Picture two yards receiving identical trailer loads of 500 mixed cores. Yard A grinds everything: 100% diversion from landfill, a clean circular-economy story, and 500 new platforms that now have to be manufactured somewhere to replace them. Yard B repairs 470 and grinds 30: 100% diversion, and 470 new platforms that did not have to be built.
Identical headline metric. The difference between them, at roughly 21 kg CO₂e of avoided manufacture per reused platform, is somewhere near ten tonnes of CO₂e per trailer load. Diversion rate cannot see any of that, which makes it worse than useless — it actively equates the two.
Why the bad incentive exists
Because grinding is easier, faster and lower-risk than repairing. A grinder is one machine and one operator; a repair line is a sort, a judgement, a bench, a board inventory and trained people. The output has a ready market. And the metric that most customers ask about rewards both paths equally.
We are not suggesting anybody does this cynically. We are suggesting that if you reward a number, you get the number, and this particular number is satisfied by the cheaper behaviour.
The three numbers to ask for instead
- Percentage of recovered platforms returned to service as platforms. Ours was 94.2% last year. This is the number with the environmental benefit in it.
- Percentage ground to fiber, reported separately and weighed separately. Ours was 5.8%. If it climbs, something has gone wrong with our sort line.
- What you turn away. A yard can flatter both figures by refusing damaged loads and leaving them to a dumpster. We take mixed loads including the worthless cores and haul them for less than a tipping fee, which makes our statistics slightly worse and the outcome better.
The waste hierarchy is not a slogan
Reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, dispose. It is ordered by effect and the gaps between the steps are large, not marginal. Reuse displaces manufacture entirely; recycling displaces only disposal, because a new platform still has to be built for the next load. Treating the two as interchangeable because both avoid landfill is the single most common error in packaging sustainability reporting.
What we would accept being judged on
Return-to-service percentage, measured on a weighbridge, published alongside the fiber percentage, with a statement of what we refused. If an auditor wanted one metric for this industry, that bundle is the one that cannot be gamed by buying a bigger grinder.
Priya, operations · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published June 24, 2025 · 820 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.