Why most pallet carbon claims are useless
Search for pallet sustainability figures and you will find confident numbers with no methodology attached. Some count only the sawmill. Some count the standing tree as a carbon credit. Some quietly compare a new hardwood pallet against a reused softwood one, which is comparing two different objects.
A number without its assumptions is marketing. So here are ours, written out, including where they are weakest. If your sustainability team wants to challenge a line, we would genuinely enjoy that conversation.
What goes into a new pallet
A new 48×40 softwood stringer pallet contains roughly 33 to 37 pounds of lumber. Producing that lumber involves harvest, haul to mill, sawing, drying in some cases, and transport to the pallet plant. Published life-cycle inventories for North American softwood lumber cluster around 60 to 110 kg CO₂e per cubic metre of sawn product delivered, depending heavily on whether the mill burns its own residues for energy.
Converted to a single pallet's worth of wood, and adding nails — steel is carbon-intensive per kilogram but there is less than a pound of it — plus assembly energy and delivery, we model a new pallet at 13 to 16 kg CO₂e. We use 14.2 as our central figure.
What goes into reusing one
Reuse is not free. A pallet must be collected, which means diesel. It must be graded, which means a yard, lights and people. Perhaps a fifth of them need repair, which means replacement boards, nails and a nail gun. And it must be delivered again.
We model collection and redelivery together at 1.9 kg CO₂e per pallet on our actual route data, repair materials and labour at 0.8 kg amortised across all units handled, and yard overhead at 0.4 kg. Total: 3.1 kg CO₂e to put a reused pallet back into service.
The subtraction, and the honest caveat
14.2 minus 3.1 gives 11.1 kg CO₂e avoided per reuse cycle. That is the figure we publish, rounded to 11.
Now the caveat that most marketing leaves out: this assumes the reused pallet genuinely displaces the manufacture of a new one. If a customer buys recycled pallets and the new-pallet market simply absorbs the lumber elsewhere, the real-world avoidance is smaller. Economists call this leakage, and nobody in our industry can honestly claim it is zero. We think the displacement is high — the pallet market is regional and price-responsive — but we will not pretend it is perfect.
The number that matters more than carbon
Here is something we find more persuasive than the carbon figure: wood diverted from landfill. Landfilled wood decomposes anaerobically and produces methane, which is 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 that does not depend on contested displacement assumptions at all.
That is why our zero-landfill rule is written as a rule rather than a target. Targets slip. Rules get enforced by the person at the scale.
How to use our numbers in your report
If you buy reused pallets from us, you may cite 11 kg CO₂e avoided per unit, with our methodology referenced. If you send us wood for recycling, we issue a monthly certificate with actual weights, which is a cleaner figure to report because it is measured rather than modelled.
We would rather you report a smaller measured number than a larger modelled one. Auditors feel the same way.