A tree spends decades pulling carbon out of the air and locking it into cellulose and lignin. Cut it, mill it, nail it into a platform, and that carbon is still locked up — roughly half the dry mass of wood is carbon by weight. A 48 × 40 pallet weighing forty pounds is carrying something in the region of nine kilograms of carbon, which corresponds to about thirty-three kilograms of carbon dioxide that is not in the atmosphere this year.
That is a real thing, and it is also the most over-claimed number in our industry.
The custody framing
It is more useful to think of wood as holding carbon in custody than storing it permanently. The carbon goes back to the atmosphere eventually — through decay, combustion, or microbial breakdown. What a wood products company genuinely influences is the duration of that custody and what happens at the end of it.
Reuse extends custody. Repair extends custody. Remanufacture into cladding or a planter extends it by years or decades. Grinding into mulch shortens it dramatically: mulch decomposes aerobically over a few seasons. Landfilling it is worst of all, and not for the reason most people think.
The landfill problem is methane, not carbon
Buried wood decomposes in low-oxygen conditions, and anaerobic decomposition produces methane rather than carbon dioxide. Over a twenty-year horizon methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂ — the commonly cited figure is on the order of eighty times. So the same carbon atom, released as methane instead of CO₂, does disproportionate damage.
This is the strongest single environmental argument for keeping wood out of landfill, and it is much better founded than most of the claims made about pallet recycling.
Where the over-claiming happens
- Counting the stored carbon as an avoided emission. It is not — it is a delay, and the accounting frameworks treat it as such.
- Counting both the stored carbon and the avoided manufacture of a new pallet. That is double counting, and it appears in published figures more often than it should.
- Ignoring the transport that made recovery possible. A long recovery run can consume the entire benefit.
- Treating mulch as a permanent sink. It is a two-to-five-year sink at best.
What we therefore claim, and what we do not
We claim avoided manufacture — a repaired pallet defers the harvest, milling, drying and fastening of a new one, and that is a genuine, countable emission that did not happen. We claim avoided landfill methane. We do not claim the sequestered carbon as a credit, because it is already counted in the forestry accounts upstream of us and claiming it again would be arithmetic we could not defend.
If you want the figures with every assumption exposed, the Loop Ledger on this site runs them live and prints its own factors underneath. Change the inputs. Argue with them. That is the point.
Doing the arithmetic on one platform
A 48 × 40 softwood platform weighing 40 lb is about 18 kg. Wood at 12% moisture content is roughly 88% dry matter, so around 16 kg of actual wood. Dry wood is approximately 50% carbon by mass, giving 8 kg of carbon. Multiply by 44/12 — the mass ratio of carbon dioxide to carbon — and you get about 29 kg of CO₂ equivalent held in that one platform.
That is a real quantity and it is also not ours to claim. The forestry accounts upstream already record that sequestration when the tree grew. Counting it again at the pallet stage is double counting, and it appears in published pallet-industry figures more often than it should.
What we do claim, with the working shown
Avoided manufacture. Building a new platform costs somewhere around 24 kg CO₂e cradle-to-yard across harvest, milling, drying, fasteners and inbound freight. Recovering, repairing, re-grading and re-delivering an existing one costs us about 3.1 kg, dominated by the truck. The difference, roughly 21 kg per platform, is an emission that did not happen because a repair happened instead.
Avoided landfill methane is the second claim, and we state it as a mechanism rather than a number because the quantity depends on a specific landfill's compaction, moisture and gas capture rate, none of which we know.
Custody duration, ranked
- Reclaimed cladding or millwork: decades. The longest custody extension available to us, and the smallest volume.
- Repaired and returned to service: two to four additional years per cycle, repeatable. This is where essentially all of the benefit lives, because this is where essentially all of the volume is.
- Animal bedding: months to a few years, then aerobic breakdown.
- Landscape mulch: two to five years of aerobic decay. A delay, not a sink.
- Biomass combustion: immediate release, but displacing fossil fuel, which is a different and generally favourable trade.
- Landfill: slow release as methane. The worst outcome for the same carbon.
Why we publish the ranking rather than a number
Because the ranking is robust and the numbers are not. Every figure above moves with assumptions about transport distance, allocation method and end-of-life pathway, and a different analyst using the same data could defensibly produce a total a third higher or lower. The order of preference, however, does not move. Reuse beats recycling beats recovery beats disposal, every time, by a wide margin.
Priya, operations · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published September 17, 2024 · 884 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.