We are a hardwood yard, which makes us the wrong people to ask for an unbiased comparison — so here is a deliberately uncomfortable one, with the cases against wood stated as strongly as we can make them.
Wood
Cheapest per unit by a wide margin, repairable with a hammer, locally available, structurally excellent in hardwood, and at end of life it becomes mulch or fiber. Reused, its embodied carbon is roughly an eighth of a new pallet of any material.
Against it: dimensional variability, porosity, susceptibility to moisture and mould, weight, and the fact that it carries fasteners that can protrude. In washdown environments and highly automated lines, these are not quibbles — they are disqualifying.
Plastic
Dimensionally consistent to a millimetre, washable, immune to mould, nestable, and predictable enough for robotic handling. In pharmaceutical, sanitary and automated applications it is the correct answer, and we will say so.
Against it: four to eight times the capital cost, poor repairability, a tendency to crack irreparably rather than fail locally, and an end-of-life story that depends entirely on a recycler actually existing for that polymer. A cracked plastic pallet in a yard is a genuinely awkward object.
Metal
Extremely strong, long-lived, fully recyclable, and the obvious choice for very heavy point loads, high-temperature environments and some aerospace and defence applications.
Against it: cost, weight, noise, thermal conductivity in cold chain, and corrosion in wet environments. Also, a metal pallet that deforms is usually scrap rather than repair.
Corrugated and pressed fibre
Very light, very cheap, recyclable through existing paper streams, and excellent for air freight and one-way export where return is impossible and weight is expensive.
Against it: low capacity, zero moisture tolerance, and essentially single-use. It is a packaging component rather than a pallet in the handling sense.
- Washdown or sanitary zone: plastic.
- Automated storage with tight tolerances: plastic or engineered new wood.
- Very heavy point loads or high heat: metal.
- Air freight, one-way export, weight-critical: corrugated.
- Everything else — which is most of the freight in North America: hardwood, reused.
The honest summary
Material choice is an application question, not an identity. The mistake we see most often is not choosing the wrong material; it is choosing one material for an entire operation when different lanes want different things. Hybrid pools — plastic inside the washdown loop, hardwood everywhere else — are usually cheaper than either purist position.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on January 16, 2024. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- January 16, 2024
- Category
- Materials
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “Wood, plastic, metal, corrugated: the comparison without the sales pitch”, Repallet Shop, January 16, 2024. repalletshop.com/blog/materials-comparison-wood-plastic-metal