Sell the pallets stacking up at your dock

What is worth selling

Who sells around the bay

Docks that receive more pallets than they ship are the usual sellers: grocery and retail receiving docks, fulfillment buildings, and plants that take inbound loads on pallets they never reuse. Amazon's Johnston building is 3.8 million square feet and Myles Standish Industrial Park holds about 100 companies, so a lot of inbound wood passes through a small region.

Small sellers count too. A mill-building tenant in Pawtucket with sixty pallets stacked on a loading zone has the same question as a distribution dock with six hundred: what is this wood, and who wants it?

How a buyer reads a stack

Size, grade, count and distance are the four things a buyer weighs first; what pallets are worth explains each without quoting prices.

1. Size: measure the stringer side first, as in 48 x 40.
2. Condition: broken boards, loose nails, and any plug or plate.
3. Dryness: wood stored wet and dark is worth less, and for food buyers it is no use at all.
4. Treatment: a heat-treated stamp can matter if the buyer exports.
5. Count: a full trailer is a different sale from twenty pallets.

A stack sorted by size and stacked straight can be judged in a minute; a heap of mixed wood takes longer and tends to be priced as a mixed load. Broken pallets with no repairable boards belong on the clear desk, and pallets that carried chemicals or hazardous goods should be flagged and kept apart.

Cores and mixed loads

A core is a used pallet its owner no longer needs, recovered for repair, resale, remanufacturing or, if it is beyond repair, chipping for mulch, composite products or biomass. A pile of cores is often a mixed load of more than one size and grade. Blackstone Valley mill buildings and Providence back lots collect them slowly, a delivery at a time, until the pile blocks a door, and it is rarely sorted or counted.

Pooled pallets

Pooled pallets, the painted ones from rental companies like CHEP, are rented, not sold, and the pooling company tracks its own fleet. A buyer who finds them in a purchased lot has stock they cannot resell, and the dock that held them may owe the pooling company, so check a pile for them before describing it:

• A single bright colour, usually blue or red, over the whole pallet.
• A logo or name burned or printed on a block or stringer.
• A consistent build that is plainly not a run of mixed used stock.

Separate them from the rest of the pile, keep a count, and keep them dry and stacked apart until they are collected; never paint over or sand off the markings. The pooling company's own site explains returns for its pallets.

What to send

• The count, even as a range. For stacks, measure the height of one, divide by the thickness of a pallet, roughly five and a half to six inches, and multiply by the number of stacks; round down, because the bottom pallets are often crushed.
• The size, and the grade if you can tell; for a mixed pile, the spread of sizes and the share that is broken.
• Whether any pooled pallets are mixed in.
• The town, and whether the stack is dry and under cover.
• Whether the pile is a one-off or comes back every week or month; recurring clearing is a different arrangement from a one-off sale.

Compare "about 200 pallets, wood, some broken" with "about 200 pallets, 48 x 40, mostly Grade B with some plugs, about 20 broken and set aside, stacked under cover in Cranston, one-time". The second names the count, the size, the grade, the damage, the cover and the place.