Broken pallet recycling

Repair comes first

A pallet with an intact frame is repaired, not ground. One or two broken deck boards are cut off and replaced with reclaimed boards of the same size. A cracked stringer can be reinforced with a metal plate or a second, shorter stringer nailed alongside it (a "companion"). The result is a sound Grade B pallet, back in use at a fraction of what a new one costs.

That's why it pays to sort repairable pallets apart from scrap at the dock: a repairable pallet has value, and mixing it into a scrap stack throws that away.

Then dismantling

Pallets beyond repair are taken apart. Recyclers use dismantling machines with a band saw that slices through the nails between boards and stringers, so the boards come off whole. Sorted by length, those boards become the spare parts for repairs, or are cut down for smaller pallets and crates.

What's left is ground

Splintered boards, broken blocks and short offcuts go through a grinder. The chips have several markets:

• Landscape mulch, often dyed brown, red or black.
• Animal bedding for farms and stables, from clean, dry wood.
• Biomass fuel for boilers and power plants.
• Compost bulking, where the wood balances wet food and yard waste.

Magnets pull the nails and staples out of the chip stream, and the steel is sold as scrap metal.

What can't go into mulch?

Wood soaked with chemicals or oil, painted pallets from rental pools (which aren't ours to grind anyway), and pallets mixed with plastic, foam or strapping. Tell us about spills when you send the request so the crew can keep that wood separate. Heat-treated pallets (stamped HT) are ordinary wood that was heated to kill pests, and recycle like any other. See reading pallet stamps.

Pallet waste removal

Sometimes a pile is all scrap: a back lot of weathered pallets, broken crates, dunnage and blocking. We collect that as waste removal and still send the wood to recycling rather than landfill wherever it's clean enough.