Compare / materials

Wood vs plastic pallets

Plastic genuinely wins in wash-down and deep-freeze. Everywhere else it costs five to ten times more, cannot be repaired, and carries a far heavier manufacturing footprint. We sell both and we will tell you which one your line needs.

Close view of a single stack of stringer pallets showing deck boards and stamps — 48×40 stringer, stamped

Request a quote

Put this page into a quote.

The fields below reach the same yard team that wrote this page. Tell us the size, the count and the grade you think you need — we will confirm it or correct it, in writing, within one business day.

Portland, OR · email only, no phone

First name *

Last name *

Email *A mailbox you actually read — this is how we reply.

Phone *US or Canada, 10 digits — format (503) 274-0900.

Company

Address

City

State / Province

Postal code *US ZIP or Canadian code.

Select service *

Product type *Type freely or pick from the list.

Quantity *Whole number — per month or one-time.

Grade

Message

Required fields are marked *. We validate every entry, so a typo in your email or ZIP will be flagged before the request is sent. Read our privacy note.

This is the one comparison where a reuse company should be careful, because plastic is a reuse product too: a plastic pallet that completes eighty trips has a respectable per-use footprint. The question is whether your operation will ever get those eighty trips out of it.

Most do not. Plastic pallets crack at a corner, and a cracked plastic pallet is finished — there is no companion stringer for a moulded part. Wood fails gradually and is repaired twenty minutes at a time.

Detail

What this means in practice

Choose plastic for wash-down
If the pallet is sanitised between uses — raw protein, dairy, pharmaceutical cleanrooms — wood will not survive and should not be asked to.
Choose plastic for closed, tracked loops
A plastic pallet only pays back over many trips. That needs a loop you control, with losses tracked. Open-loop plastic is money left on other people's docks.
Choose wood for almost everything else
Lower cost, repairable, lighter than rackable plastic, and recoverable into four products at end of life.
Do not choose plastic for export
It is ISPM-15 exempt, which sounds convenient until you realise you have just posted a $400 asset overseas with no return mechanism.

Specifications

Numbers you can plan around

Published, honoured, and quoted back to you in writing on every order.

Typical figures for a 48×40 footprint. Plastic pricing varies enormously by construction; nestable and rackable grades are very different products.
Attribute	Wood (recycled)	Wood (new)	Plastic (nestable)	Plastic (rackable)
Purchase cost index	50	100	400–700	700–1,200
Tare weight	33–37 lb	36–40 lb	15–25 lb	45–70 lb
Dynamic load	2,800 lb	2,800 lb	1,500 lb	3,000 lb
Racked load	2,200 lb	2,200 lb	Not rated	2,800 lb
Expected trips	9–14, then repair	15–20, then repair	20–50	50–100
Repairable	Yes	Yes	No	No (some welding)
Wash-down	Poor	Poor	Excellent	Excellent
Deep freeze	Acceptable (kiln dried)	Acceptable	Excellent	Excellent
Embodied carbon	Low (reuse)	Moderate	High	Very high
End of life	Mulch, bedding, fuel	Same	Recyclable if clean	Recyclable if clean
Fire behaviour	Burns	Burns	Melts, drips	Melts, drips
Export compliance	ISPM-15 by HT	ISPM-15 by HT	Exempt	Exempt

The per-trip arithmetic, honestly

Take a rackable plastic pallet at a cost index of 900 and an optimistic 80 trips: that is 11.3 per trip. A Grade A recycled wooden pallet at 50 with 12 trips plus a repair cycle is about 4.3 per trip. Plastic needs roughly 200 trips to match it, which almost nothing in general distribution achieves.

Where plastic wins is not the arithmetic — it is the requirement. If your audit says the pallet must be washable, there is no wooden answer and the arithmetic is irrelevant.

The loss problem nobody budgets for

Plastic pallets disappear. They are attractive, light, and valuable enough that they do not come back from third-party docks. Operations that switch to plastic without a tracking and return mechanism commonly lose 10–30% of the fleet in the first year, which destroys the per-trip maths completely.

Wood tolerates loss because each unit is cheap and the material is universally recoverable. If you cannot guarantee a closed loop, that tolerance is worth more than any technical advantage.

What we recommend, line by line

Raw protein and dairy wash-down: plastic. Cleanroom and sterile pharmaceutical: plastic. Deep-freeze storage with constant thermal cycling: kiln-dried wood as standard, plastic where the cycling is severe. General distribution, retail, agriculture, construction, beverage, export: wood, almost always recycled.

We stock plastic for the first two cases and will not try to talk you out of it. We will, however, ask whether your loop is genuinely closed before you commit the capital.

PalletLinker published ratings. Quoted back to you in writing on every order. Racked figures assume edge support only, evenly distributed, no overhang.
Pallet	Dynamic	Racked
48×40 GMA Grade A	2,800 lb	2,200 lb
48×40 GMA Grade B	2,200 lb	1,500 lb
48×40 block 4-way	2,500 lb	2,400 lb
EPAL / Euro 1	3,300 lb	2,200 lb
Remanufactured	2,000 lb	1,200 lb

Money

How a pallet price is actually built

Four inputs, in descending order of importance. None of them is a list price, which is why we quote rather than publish.

Today's pool depth: How many units of that footprint and grade are physically in the yard this week. Used stock is not manufactured on demand.
Grade and screening: Grade A costs more than B because the yield is lower, not because the wood is different. Screened automation pools cost more again.
Freight: Always itemised separately. Paired loads — where your delivery rides with a collection — are priced lower because they genuinely cost us less.
Volume and commitment: A quarterly supply program fixes a price and reserves stock. Spot buying at peak is the most expensive way to buy pallets.

New 48×40 palletindex 100
Grade A recycled45–55
Grade B recycled30–40
Remanufactured25–35
Repairing your own40–55% of replacement

Indicative cost index against a new pallet of the same footprint. Purchase price is typically only 5–15% of a pallet's total cost per trip — freight weight, damage and receiving-dock rework are usually larger. The full arithmetic

Process

How a first order actually happens

No sales team, no discovery call, no CRM sequence. We have no telephone, so everything below happens in writing and stays searchable afterwards.

What we need: footprint, grade, count, ZIP, and how the pallet is handled.
Nice to have: a photo, your dock height, whether you run forklifts or jacks.
Not needed: a purchase order, an account, or a phone conversation.

01
You send the form
Every form on this site is the same form and reaches the same yard team. Required fields are validated as you type, so a mistyped ZIP or email is caught before anything is sent.
02
We check today's stock
Used pallet availability moves daily. You get a real count and a real date rather than a list price that was true last quarter.
03
A written quote, within one business day
Price per unit by grade, freight itemised separately, delivery window, and any honest reservations we have about the specification you asked for.
04
Delivery, count, paperwork
Signed count sheet on arrival, weight ticket where relevant, and a diversion certificate for anything we collect for recycling.

01
Published specifications
Grade definitions, dimensional tolerances and racked load ratings in writing. Most yards will not publish a racked figure at all.
02
Hand graded, four-hour triage
Two graders per line, flipped and sounded. Every inbound load is triaged within four working hours so nothing rots in a mystery pile.
03
Zero landfill, measured
Weighed in, weighed out, reconciled monthly. Zero pounds landfilled in 2025, with a certificate you can hand to an auditor.
04
Everything in writing
No phone line by choice. Every price, date and commitment lives in an email you can search, forward and hold us to.
05
Repair before replacement
A repair bay, a kiln, a de-nailer and a grinder on site. Repairing a pallet avoids roughly 11 kg CO₂e and costs you half of new.
06
Traceable by stamp
Every unit carries a Pallet Passport ID burned into a stringer. Type it in and read its species, cycles, repairs and carbon ledger.

Receiving

What to check on delivery

Eleven minutes on the first three deliveries sets the tone for the whole relationship. Do this with any supplier, including us.

Check	How	Pass	If it fails
Overall size	Tape measure, both dimensions, one pallet in ten	Within 1/4" (Grade A) or 1/2" (Grade B)	Note it on the delivery ticket
Squareness	Steel square in two opposite corners	Within 1/4" on the diagonal	Reject the unit; we replace next route
Protruding nails	Palm flat across the top deck	Nothing catches	Reject — this is what tears packaging
Bottom boards	Flip one pallet in ten	No split through a nail line	Reject; it will fail in a rack
Moisture	Lift one. Wet pallets are 8–10 lb heavier	Feels dry, sounds sharp	Floor stack to dry, do not rack at rating
Mould or staining	Visual, both decks	Weathering only, no fuzz	Reject for any food-contact use
Grade mix	Count against the delivery note	Matches what you ordered	Ask for the count sheet to be corrected

Write failures on the delivery ticket rather than calling — a written record is the only thing that reliably changes supplier behaviour, and we replace rejected units on the next route with no restocking charge.

Avoid these

Six expensive mistakes

Every one of these has cost a customer real money in front of us.

01
Buying on unit price alone
Purchase price is 5–15% of total cost per trip. Tare weight, damage rate and receiving-dock rework are usually larger line items, and none of them appear on a quote comparison.
02
Accepting overhang
A load extending even an inch past the deck transfers weight into the packaging instead of the pallet. Case compression strength drops sharply and the damage appears three handling events later, in somebody else's warehouse.
03
Racking on a dynamic rating
Dynamic is what a pallet carries while being moved. Racked — supported only at its edges — is smaller and is the only number that matters in beam racking. Ask for it in writing.
04
Specifying Grade A out of habit
For one-way shipping, floor stacking and closed loops, Grade B does the same job for roughly 20% less. Over-specifying is paying for appearance.
05
Storing pallets on bare ground
Two spare pallets as a base and a tarp that reaches the sides will keep a stack usable through a Portland winter. A soaked pallet gains nine pounds of paid freight weight and loses stiffness.
06
Forgetting that dunnage needs a stamp
On export loads the bracing, blocking and chocks are solid wood packaging too. One untreated board can hold an entire container at a foreign port.

The yard

What stands behind this page

14kpallets graded monthlytwo hand-grading lines
1,100heat treated per dayISPM-15, chart recorded
4.1M lbwood diverted last year68% reused whole
0 lblandfilled in 2025weighed and reconciled

What this means for your reporting

Reuse is the cheapest emissions reduction available in logistics, and it is also the easiest to document. We model a new 48×40 softwood pallet at 14.2 kg CO₂e — lumber production, fasteners, assembly and delivery — and a reuse cycle at 3.1 kg, covering collection, repair materials, yard overhead and redelivery. The difference, 11 kg CO₂e per reuse, is the figure we publish.

We also publish the caveat: that figure assumes a reused pallet genuinely displaces the manufacture of a new one. Economists call the gap leakage, and nobody in this industry can honestly claim it is zero. We think displacement is high because the pallet market is regional and price-responsive, but we will not pretend it is perfect.

Which is why we lead with the number that needs no assumptions: measured landfill diversion. Landfilled wood decomposes anaerobically and releases methane, roughly 28 times worse than CO₂ over a century. Keeping four million pounds of wood out of a hole in the ground is a benefit you can weigh.

Per-unit figures

New pallet: 14.2 kg CO₂e (range 12.8–16.1)
Reused graded pallet: 3.1 kg CO₂e
Repaired customer-owned: 2.2 kg CO₂e
Avoided per reuse: 11 kg CO₂e, published
Wood kept in service: 33–37 lb per unit
Biogenic carbon stored: ~26 kg CO₂-equivalent

The full derivation

Questions

Asked often

Is plastic more hygienic?

It is easier to sanitise, which is not the same claim. A kiln-dried, heat-treated wooden pallet from a dry pool passes food audits routinely. A filthy plastic pallet fails them.

Do you sell plastic pallets?

We supply them where a wash-down or cleanroom line genuinely requires them. We do not manufacture them, and we will tell you when wood is the better buy.

What about hybrid or composite pallets?

Pressed-wood and composite block pallets are excellent for export — light, ISPM-15 exempt, one-way — and we will quote them. They are not repairable, so they do not suit closed loops.

Questions

What people ask about wood vs plastic pallets

What is the minimum order or pickup?

No hard minimum for collection at the yard — come and take four pallets on a Saturday morning if you like. For delivery it is 50 units inside Portland metro and 150 outside it, because the truck has to earn its diesel. Outside our 180-mile fleet radius we quote through partner yards and freight, with the lane itemised.

How fast can this happen?

Standard 48×40 Grade A and B stock: same day for pickup, next day for metro delivery. Block pallets one to three days. Custom builds five to nine business days; engineered runs two to three weeks. Heat treatment is same day for booked batches and 48 hours standard. Written quotes always come back within one business day.

Why is there no phone number anywhere?

Because verbal quotes get remembered differently by different people. Since 2018 every price, date and commitment we make exists in an email you can search and forward. Most customers dislike it for about a month and then prefer it. Everything else happens in person at 3821 NW St Helens Rd, Portland, OR 97210.

Can I inspect before committing?

Please do. Visit the yard by email arrangement — closed-toe boots required, hi-vis provided — or ask for photographs of the actual pool your order would come from. We would rather lose an order than have a customer discover a surprise on their dock.

What documentation comes with it?

A written quote, a signed count sheet by grade, a weight ticket where material is weighed, heat-treatment certificates for treated batches (archived seven years), and a monthly diversion certificate for anything we collect for recycling — measured pounds kept out of landfill, which is the figure your ESG report actually needs.

What will you refuse to do?

Take methyl-bromide fumigated, chemically contaminated or fire-damaged wood. Buy marked rental-pool pallets, which belong to their operator. Promise same-day delivery outside the metro. Or quote a grade we do not think will survive your handling — we will specify downward and explain why.

Vocabulary

Terms used on this page

Defined the way a yard uses them, not the way a standards document does.

Block pallet: A pallet supported by nine solid blocks rather than stringers, giving true four-way entry and better racked performance.
Bolster: A squared timber used to block and brace loads inside trailers and containers. We re-saw ours from retired stringers.
Chamfer: The bevelled edge on a bottom deck board that lets a pallet jack roll on without catching.
Companion stringer: A second timber nailed alongside a cracked stringer to span the damage and restore the load path.
Core: Low-grade pallet material bought for board and fibre recovery rather than resale.
Closed loop: A pallet population circulating between known points and returning. Cycle time, not consumption, governs pool size.
Deck board: The boards nailed across stringers or blocks forming the top and bottom surfaces of a pallet.
De-nailer: The machine that separates deck boards from stringers and removes fasteners before fibre recovery.

The full glossary, 36 terms

Long reads

From the journal · written in the yard

Decision table

Five ways to get a pallet, compared honestly

Including the two we do not sell. Cost index is against a new wooden pallet of the same footprint.

Indicative figures for a 48×40 footprint in the Pacific Northwest, 2026. Rental pool economics vary by contract and are deliberately shown as a range.
Option	Cost index	Trips	Repairable	Carbon per use	Best for	Watch out for
Grade A recycled	45–55	9–14 then repair	Yes	3.1 kg	Almost everything	Colour varies; tare varies by a few pounds
Grade B recycled	30–40	7–11 then repair	Yes	3.1 kg	One-way, floor stacking, closed loops	Lower racked rating (1,500 lb)
Remanufactured	25–35	5–8	Yes	4.8 kg	One-way on a budget	Visibly mixed boards; 1,200 lb racked
New wooden	100	15–20 then repair	Yes	14.2 kg	Tight tolerances, audits, odd sizes	Pays for appearance you may not need
Plastic	500–1,000	30–100	No	High embodied, low per-use	Wash-down, deep freeze, pharma	Cracks end its life; not repairable
Rental pool	Per-trip fee	Managed	By operator	Operator's figure	Exchange networks, retail mandates	Pallets are not yours; losses are chargeable

We sell the first four and supply plastic where a wash-down line genuinely needs it. We do not operate a rental pool, and we will not buy marked pool pallets from you — they belong to their operator. Full comparisons

Worked example

Cost per trip, calculated properly

A real comparison for a plant shipping 600 pallets a month on a weight-sensitive lane. Copy the method, not the numbers.

Illustrative. Your lane rate, damage rate and disposal cost will differ — the point is that unit price is the smallest line in the table.
Line	New pallet	Grade A recycled	Grade B recycled	Note
Unit purchase price (index)	100	50	35	The only number most procurement systems compare
Trips before repair	15–20	9–14	7–11	New lasts longer; it also costs twice as much
Purchase cost per trip (index)	5.6	4.3	3.8	Price divided by trips
Tare weight	36 lb	35 lb	33 lb	Recycled fir is often lighter than new hardwood
Freight weight penalty	Baseline	Neutral	−3 lb/unit	Only matters on weight-limited lanes
Expected damage rate	0.3%	0.3%	0.4%	Graded stock behaves; ungraded stock does not
Receiving rejections	Rare	Rare	Occasional	Graded + written tolerance removes most of this
End-of-life cost	0	0	0	We collect and pay or collect free — never a disposal fee
Documentation value	None	Diversion certificate	Diversion certificate	Reportable ESG outcome at no extra cost

Purchase price share of total cost5–15%
Freight weight share~30%
Damage & rework share~38%
Handling labour share~20%

Build this yourself

One row per option, six columns: unit price, tare weight, expected trips, damage rate, rejection risk, disposal cost. Multiply out across annual volume. It takes an afternoon, the cheapest unit price almost never wins, and we will happily help build it — including with numbers that do not favour us.

The full article

Diagnostics

Read the damage, fix the cause

Damage patterns are not random. Each one points at a specific handling behaviour, and fixing the behaviour is worth more than fixing the pallets.

What you see	What it almost always means	What to change	Cost to fix
Split lead boards at one end	Forks driven in too fast and too high	Operator training; dock lighting. Usually one shift is responsible	Free
Torn stringer notches	Pallet jacks entering notched stringers at an angle	Specify block pallets with true four-way entry	Spec change
Bottom boards ripped off cleanly	Pallets dragged rather than lifted, or frozen to a cold-store floor	Floor condition, forklift capacity at peak	Low
Crushed corner blocks	Stacks higher than the rating, or uneven loads on one corner	Stack-height policy; centre the load	Free
Out of square, nothing broken	Racking loading pallets diagonally — beams at different heights	Rack survey. This one is worth chasing	Medium
Mould in the middle of a stack	Wet pallets stacked tight with no airflow	Store off the ground, cover the top, leave side gaps	Low
Protruding nails tearing cases	Ungraded stock, or units repaired without re-checking	Buy graded; reject on the ticket	Free
Deck boards cupping	Moisture cycling between a freezer and a humid dock	Kiln-dried pool; helical fasteners	Spec change

Keep thirty of your own broken pallets aside for a month and photograph the damage. Patterns appear quickly. We do this analysis free with any repair quote, because a customer whose damage rate halves buys from us for a decade.

Storage

Keeping pallets usable through a wet winter

Portland takes about 36 inches of rain a year and most of it lands between November and March. You do not need a building to survive that — you need three habits.

Off the ground: Two spare pallets as a base. Anything touching soil wicks water and rots from the bottom layer up.
Covered on top: A tarp that actually reaches the sides. Rain enters a stack from above, not from the side.
Air gaps, not a seal: A sealed tarp traps condensation and produces the mould problem you were avoiding. Leave the sides open.
Away from drip lines: Anything under a roofline drip edge stays wet all winter, regardless of what you cover it with.
Aligned with the wind: Stacks oriented with prevailing wind dry noticeably faster. Free, and it works.
Rotate the pile: First in, first out. The bottom of an untouched stack is where pallets go to die.

What moisture does, measured on our own scale and grading line.
Condition	Weight	Stiffness	Rack it?
Kiln dried (≤19% MC)	33 lb	Full rating	Yes
Air dried, covered	35 lb	Full rating	Yes
Damp, uncovered 2 weeks	39 lb	Reduced	Floor stack
Rain-soaked	45 lb	Materially reduced	No — let it dry
Frozen wet	45 lb+	Unpredictable	No

Nine pounds of water per pallet is nine pounds of freight you pay to move. Across 600 units that is more than two and a half tonnes of water on a truck. Field notes on moisture

Freight

What fits in what

Pallet counts per vehicle and container, so you can sanity-check a quote before you accept it.

Empty pallets, stacked, with typical safe stack heights. Loaded counts are governed by your product, not by the pallet.
Equipment	Floor positions (48×40)	Empty pallets stacked	Notes
53' dry van	30	up to ~560	The standard North American trailer
48' dry van	26	up to ~500	Still common on regional lanes
48' flatbed	26	up to ~520	Our workhorse for yard-to-yard moves
53' curtain-sider	30	up to ~560	Weather protection with side access
26' box truck, lift-gate	12	up to ~240	Urban docks with no forklift
40' ocean container	20	up to ~400	ISPM-15 marking required
40' high-cube container	20	up to ~460	Extra height, same floor
20' ocean container	10	up to ~200	Heavy, dense loads
40 yd hook-lift container	n/a	~90 loose cores	For standing recycling bins

Pallet freight is almost always weight-constrained before it is cube-constrained, which is why tare weight is a real cost line. How we price a lane

Reference

Standards, bodies and who decides what

Pallets sit under a surprising number of overlapping rules. Here is who writes them and what they actually govern.

Reference	Who maintains it	What it governs	Does it bind a used pallet sale?
ISPM-15	IPPC, under the UN FAO	Treatment and marking of solid wood packaging in international trade	Yes, for export
GMA footprint (48×40)	Industry convention, originally grocery manufacturers	A footprint, not a quality level	No — it is a size
EPAL / EUR	European Pallet Association	Euro pallet construction, repair and branding	Yes, if sold as EPAL
ISO 6780	International Organization for Standardization	Principal pallet footprints worldwide	No
ASTM D1185 / D1083	ASTM International	Test methods for pallet performance	No, but ratings reference them
PDS (Pallet Design System)	Virginia Tech / NWPCA	Engineering-grade load modelling	No — a design tool
NWPCA uniform standards	National Wooden Pallet & Container Association	Common grade vocabulary	Voluntary
OSHA 1910.176	US Dept of Labor	Safe storage, stacking and housekeeping	Yes, in your building
Oregon EPR (SB 582)	Oregon DEQ	Producer responsibility for packaging; wood is in scope for reporting	Increasingly, yes
FSMA / food safety plans	US FDA	Packaging as a food-contact hazard consideration	Via your audit, yes

The gap in that list is the interesting part: no authority grades used pallets. That is why a written supplier specification — ours is published here — is the entire quality system in this industry.

Go deeper

Everything else on this site

Read the journal

Next step

Shall we put a number on it?

Email reaches the same yard team that graded the stock. Written quotes, one business day, no phone tag.

Wood vs plastic pallets

Put this page into a quote.

What this means in practice

Choose plastic for wash-down

Choose plastic for closed, tracked loops

Choose wood for almost everything else

Do not choose plastic for export

Numbers you can plan around

The per-trip arithmetic, honestly

The loss problem nobody budgets for

What we recommend, line by line

How a pallet price is actually built

How a first order actually happens

You send the form

We check today's stock

A written quote, within one business day

Delivery, count, paperwork

Published specifications

Hand graded, four-hour triage

Zero landfill, measured

Everything in writing

Repair before replacement

Traceable by stamp

What to check on delivery

Six expensive mistakes

Buying on unit price alone

Accepting overhang

Racking on a dynamic rating

Specifying Grade A out of habit

Storing pallets on bare ground

Forgetting that dunnage needs a stamp