◆ Zero to landfill, on purpose
Broken isn't trash. It's raw material.
A cracked deck board doesn't send a pallet to the landfill here — it sends it to our reclamation line. We repair before we recycle, recycle before we scrap, and turn whatever's left into mulch and biomass. Nothing goes in the ground.
Answer: yes, we recycle broken pallets — and target zero wood to landfill.
Recycle your pallets
1-min quote● The short version
Repair first. Reclaim second. Landfill never.
That order is the whole philosophy. A pallet is a stack of good lumber that happens to be nailed together — our job is to keep as much of that lumber working as possible, for as long as possible.
Repair to grade
If it can be rebuilt into a serviceable pallet, it is — that's the highest, best reuse.
Reclaim the lumber
Boards too short to rebuild a full pallet become repair stock for the next one.
Grind, don't bury
Wood that can't be reused becomes mulch, biomass or dunnage — never landfill.
→ Our reclamation line
Intake to re-grade, step by step
This is the path a broken 48x40 walks from the moment it crosses our dock to the moment it rolls back onto a trailer.
Intake
Loads hit the dock and get counted. Nothing is written off before it's inspected — broken is a starting point, not a verdict.
Sort
Pallets split by size, style and condition. Repairable units go one way; teardown candidates go another.
Teardown
Beyond-repair pallets are dismantled with a pry-and-band setup that saves boards and pulls nails instead of splitting the wood.
Re-nail & repair
Sound stringers and deck boards are re-nailed into serviceable pallets, swapping in reclaimed lumber where a board is cracked or short.
Heat treat
Units bound for export are kiln heat-treated to the ISPM-15 standard and marked — no chemicals, just controlled heat.
Re-grade
Rebuilt pallets are inspected and graded (A, B, #1, #2) so buyers know exactly what they're getting.
Want the full walk-through? Read inside a pallet's second life.
♻ The last 5%
Where truly unusable wood goes
Even after repair and reclaim, a little wood is too split, too wet or too nail-riddled to reuse. Here's where it lands instead of a landfill.
Mulch
Clean scrap is ground into landscaping and garden mulch — the same wood, keeping soil covered.
Biomass fuel
Wood not fit for mulch can be chipped for biomass energy instead of releasing methane in a landfill.
Dunnage & blocking
Sturdy off-cuts get a second job as dunnage, blocking and bracing for freight.
★ Why it matters
Every board saved is a tree that stayed standing.
Wood pallets are one of the most-recycled packaging products in the country — and for good reason. A single reclaimed pallet keeps roughly ~30 lbs of solid lumber in use and out of the ground. Multiply that across a warehouse's annual churn and the avoided waste is enormous.
Landfilled wood doesn't just take up space — as it breaks down it releases methane. Keeping pallets in the loop skips that entirely. That's the case for recycling in one sentence.
◆ Related services
Selling, buying, hauling & more
Got a heap of broken pallets?
Send counts and your ZIP — we'll reclaim what we can and keep every board out of the landfill.