The United States produces approximately 500 million new pallets every year. Of the estimated 2 billion pallets in circulation, roughly 250 million are disposed of annually. Where do they all go?
Despite significant improvements in recycling rates, an estimated 50-70 million pallets still end up in landfills each year. That's over 15% of all pallets produced — hundreds of thousands of tons of perfectly recyclable wood buried in the ground.
In landfills, wooden pallets decompose slowly and produce methane — a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO₂ over a 20-year period. The EPA estimates that wood waste in landfills contributes approximately 12 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent emissions annually.
The wood volume is staggering. Those 50 million pallets represent approximately 600 million board feet of lumber — enough to build 40,000 average American homes. The trees that produced that lumber absorbed CO₂ for decades before being cut, processed into pallets, used a few times, and buried.
But here's the good news: pallet recycling rates have improved dramatically over the past two decades. In 1995, only about 50% of pallets were recycled. Today, that figure exceeds 80% nationally, with some regions achieving over 95% recycling rates.
The remaining gap — those 50-70 million pallets still going to landfill — represents both a problem and an opportunity. Many of these pallets come from small businesses that lack access to recycling services, or from regions where recycling infrastructure is underdeveloped.
This is exactly why we operate our collection and buyback programs. We make it easy and financially attractive for businesses to recycle their pallets instead of discarding them. Every pallet we collect is one more pallet saved from the landfill.