A truck and a rented half-acre
Hollis Reyes started collecting pallets from four Portland breweries in a borrowed flatbed, grading them on gravel in Northwest Industrial. Revenue in month one: $1,840.
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Seventeen years and still answering every form.
Same yard, same rule, same written quotes. Tell us what you need.
Portland, OR · email only, no phone
2009 → 2026
The whole record
2009 2010 Competing on price, learning the hard way
Undercutting everyone kept the lights on during the recession and taught customers to see us as cheap. Climbing back out took three years.
2012 The grinder that arrived too early
Bought with more optimism than volume. Nearly ended the company, and is now central to the zero-landfill rule.
2013 The move to St Helens Road
Four acres between the railway and the river. Room for a repair bay, which changed the business from hauling to manufacturing.
2014 We published a grade standard
Written definitions for A, B, core and reman, with tolerances. Revenue dipped for a quarter. Then it did not.
2015 The racked load rating
After a customer's near-miss in a beam rack, we published an edge-support rating. It forced us to grade properly, which turned out to be the product.
2016 Kiln and ISPM-15 registration
Heat treatment on site meant export customers stopped being somebody else's business.
2018 Email only
We shut off the phone line. Every quote and commitment became written and searchable. The single best operational decision we have made.
2019 The fabrication shop opens
Clear boards from retired decks became shelving, counters and retail fixtures instead of mulch.
2020 Essential, exhausting, instructive
Food and agriculture never stopped. We ran skeleton crews, learned to schedule properly, and kept every job.
2021 Zero landfill, measured
First full year with weighed reconciliation on every inbound and outbound stream. Zero landfill tonnage, and we have held it since.
2022 The Pallet Passport
A winery asked where the wood had been. We could not answer, so we started stamping an ID into every unit that crosses the scale.
2023 On-site sorting crews
Distribution centres asked us to bring the line to them. Now our crews work inside customer yards to our published standard.
2024 Nationwide network
Partner yards and freight relationships extended written-quote service to all fifty states, with Portland still doing the grading we are responsible for.
2025 4.1 million pounds diverted
Our largest year of recovery, 68% of it reused whole rather than ground. The repair bay did most of that work.
2026 Seventeen years, same rule
No organic material leaves this yard in a dumpster. Everything else about the company has changed at least twice.
- 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
- 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.
Long reads
From the journal · written in the yard
- Jul 21, 2026 · 7 min
Fifteen years on St Helens Road: what we got wrong
A short, honest list of the decisions that cost us money, and the three that saved the company.…
- Dec 10, 2024 · 7 min
Why we gave every pallet a name: the thinking behind the Pallet Passport
We stamp an ID into every unit that crosses our scale. It started as a traceability request and changed how our own crew…
- Nov 12, 2024 · 6 min
Why our zero-landfill promise is written as a rule, not a target
Targets slip quietly. Rules get enforced by whoever is standing at the scale at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday.…
- Mar 17, 2026 · 7 min
The brewery pallet playbook: kegs, cases and a very wet floor
Portland has more breweries per capita than almost anywhere. They have taught us a specific set of lessons about wood an…
Everything else on this site
- The size library Twenty footprints, both measurement systems, tolerances and stock depth
- Grades explained A, B, C and reman written out, including what each costs us
- Load capacity Static, dynamic and racked without hand-waving
- Published standards The whole quality system, and our rejection remedy
- Pallet Passport Type in a stamped ID and read that pallet's life
- Carbon math Line-by-line derivation with the leakage caveat
- Journal 33 long articles from the grading line
- Glossary 36 terms, yard definitions
- All locations 51 states and DC, 323 city pages
- Contact us 3821 NW St Helens Rd, Portland, OR 97210 — email only, no phone