Zero landfill is an easy sentence to write and a genuinely awkward operating condition to maintain, because it removes the option of giving up on a piece of wood. Everything that comes through the gate has to go somewhere, and the last few percent is where the policy either holds or quietly doesn't.
The first 96% is not the hard part
Sound decks get graded and reused. Repairable decks go to the bench. Good boards on dead decks go to the build shop. Everything structural beyond that gets ground into mulch, bedding or boiler fiber. None of this requires heroism — it requires a grinder, a magnet and the discipline to triage before anything hits a pile.
The awkward four percent
Wet-rotted wood weighs a fortune and screens badly. Painted and varnished timber contaminates mulch streams. Chemically treated wood — CCA, creosote — we refuse outright, because taking it would mean either landfilling it or passing a problem to somebody else dishonestly. Saying no at the gate is part of the policy, not an exception to it.
- Painted or varnished: case by case, only if it can be screened to boiler grade.
- Wet-rotted: accepted with a fee, screened to the lowest fiber grade.
- CCA / creosote treated: refused, with an explanation and a referral.
- Non-wood pallets: refused — we are a hardwood yard and would rather point you to a specialist.
How to audit a claim
Ask three questions of any supplier making this claim. What happens to wet-rotted wood? What is your refusal policy at the gate? Can you show me two weighbridge tickets, in and out, for the same load? A yard that genuinely operates this way will answer all three in under a minute, because the answers are operational rather than aspirational.
A diversion rate you cannot reconstruct from scale tickets is a marketing figure, not a measurement.
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.