A customer in Earth City let us audit their pallet waste stream for a quarter, on the condition that we not name them. They were running two thirty-yard open-top containers a month, which they considered a solved problem. It was costing them about nineteen thousand dollars a year.
Invoice one: the haul
Container rental plus hauls plus tipping fees came to roughly $640 a month. Nobody questioned it, because waste removal is a line item that reads as a fixed cost of existing.
Invoice two: the pallets they bought
In the same quarter they purchased 2,100 pallets. About a third of the decks going into their dumpsters were sound #1-grade cores that we would have paid them for, and most of the rest were repairable.
Invoice three: the labour
Two forklift operators spent an estimated six hours a week feeding and compacting the containers. At a fully loaded rate that is another nine thousand a year, and it is the invoice nobody ever writes down.
- Waste haul and tipping: ≈ $7,700 / yr
- Value of sound cores discarded: ≈ $11,400 / yr forgone
- Forklift labour on waste handling: ≈ $9,100 / yr
- Insurance exposure from stored combustible material: unquantified
The fire-load conversation
Stacked broken pallets against an exterior wall are one of the highest fuel-load configurations a warehouse can create. Most sites we visit are storing considerably more combustible material than their insurer would be comfortable discussing, and the inspection that eventually forces the issue is a much more expensive event than a weekly collection.
What replaced it
A standing Thursday collection, a buy-back rate fixed for the quarter and a sorting rule posted on the dock wall: cores on the left, scrap on the right. The two containers went away. Net swing in the first year was a little over twenty-six thousand dollars, and the dock has a fire lane again.
Constants used in this piece
- New hardwood pallet, embodied
- 12.6 kg CO₂e
- Recycled deck, processed
- 1.0 kg CO₂e
- Net credit per reuse cycle
- 11.6 kg CO₂e
- Heat treatment, per deck
- 0.9 kg CO₂e
- Average pallet mass
- 15 kg / 33 lb
- Road freight
- 0.11 kg CO₂e / ton-mile
Our standing commitments
- Reuse first, repair second, recycle third, landfill never.
- A pallet is only downgraded for a defect a grader can name out loud.
- The recycled alternative appears on every quote, even when you ask for new.
- Every diversion figure traces back to a weighbridge ticket.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard in St. Louis. If a figure here looks wrong to you, tell us — our model constants are published precisely so they can be argued with.