Every pallet company claims an environmental benefit. Most do not show their work. Here is ours, including where it is soft.
The baseline
A new 48×40 GMA stringer pallet contains roughly 35–40 board feet of lumber and weighs 33–48 lb. Producing it emits something in the region of 20–30 kg CO₂e once you account for harvest, milling, drying, nails and transport to the yard. Recovering, repairing and re-grading an existing pallet costs a small fraction of that — the dominant term becomes the truck.
Where reuse wins
- Avoided lumber: a repaired pallet defers the harvest of new material entirely.
- Avoided landfill: wood in anaerobic landfill conditions generates methane, which is far more potent than CO₂ over twenty years.
- Carbon retained in product: wood that stays wood keeps its sequestered carbon locked up longer.
- Avoided manufacturing energy: no drying, no re-milling, far fewer nails.
Where the math is weaker than the brochure
- Transport can eat the benefit. A recovery run of 400 miles for a half-empty trailer is not a climate win — which is why we obsess over backhaul matching and local density.
- Repair is not free: nails, plates, replacement boards and labour all carry a footprint.
- End-of-life mulch does eventually release its carbon. Reuse delays, it does not abolish.
- Allocation choices — how you split the footprint of a mixed load — can swing a published figure by a third. Anyone quoting a precise single number is choosing assumptions you cannot see.
What we therefore promise
We publish our assumptions, we keep recovery local, we measure tonnage rather than estimating it, and we report diversion rather than a headline carbon figure we cannot defend. The Loop Ledger on this site runs the same arithmetic in front of you, with the inputs exposed. Change them and watch the answer move. That is what honest environmental claims look like.
Written by the Pallets Recycle yard crew, Richmond VA. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.