Used pallets in Washington, DC: bought, sold and cleared
The city clears and the suburbs trade.
Wooden shipping pallets, not liquidation lots.Read your pile
Tell the desk what is in the alley or on the dock. It says whether the pile looks like a sale, a buy-back or a clear-out, and sets any pooled pallets aside.
Pick your answers. The desk says whether it looks like a sale, a buy-back or a clear-out. Assumes a weekly flow off a dock door; the full reader asks the rest.
Who the desk is for
Stores, restaurants, property managers, distribution centers, 3PL docks, food distributors and plants that handle wooden shipping pallets. A back-room pile of a few dozen counts here, and so does a dock that sheds hundreds a week. Shoppers hunting liquidation lots of goods will not find what they want, while exporters who need a stamped, heat-treated pallet will.
Wanted and offered
The docks around the Beltway want a few things again and again, and shed a few others. No prices on this board and no counts: it is what the trade calls for, not what is on a shelf.
WANTED
Lanes across the region
The District has almost no room to stack pallets. The dock districts outside it have trailers to load. Each lane below opens the place where that load is usually worth sending.
All areas in DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia. A lane is how the desk thinks about a load, not a route schedule.
Grades on the stack
Sort yards spray a stripe on the end of a stack so a grade reads from across the yard. These are the stripes this desk uses. Blue and red are never grade colors: they mean pooled pallets.
No repairs, and it needs none. What a food or retail dock wants for outbound loads.
Repaired with replaced boards, plates or plugs, or a companion stringer beside a cracked one. Ships fine; priced below an A.
Several repairs, rough looking, and deck boards that may not be whole. Sound for some jobs, not for outbound freight.
Remanufactured from a mix of recycled and new lumber: more consistent than a used pallet, cheaper than all-new.
A used pallet before it is sorted: raw material to repair, dismantle or, if it is past saving, grind.
What we do not take
So the wrong requests stop here.
Pooled CHEP and PECO pallets
Blue and red painted pallets belong to the pooling company. They are not yours to sell and not ours to buy. We set them aside and point you to who collects them. See the CHEP and PECO guide.
Liquidation pallets
A pallet of returned merchandise is a different business. We deal in wooden shipping pallets: the wood that goods ride on, not the goods.
Rotten or burned wood
Pallets that are rotted through, moldy past cleaning or fire-damaged are not worth sorting. They fall under pallet recycling at best, and we will say so.
How a count becomes a reply
The count ticket, walked through. We promise no price, minimum or turnaround before we have read what you sent.
- You send the countCount, size, grade as you see it, ZIP, how the load leaves the site, and whether any pallets are painted blue or red.
- We read itThe load is read as what it is: stringer or block, a pile of cores or Grade A, whitewood or somebody’s pooled pallets. Pooled pallets are set aside.
- We say what it is worth doing withA sale, a buy-back of graded pallets, or a clear-out. If it is only worth hauling, we say that plainly.
- The load movesIf you want a pickup or a delivery, ask for it and say how your load leaves: dock door, alley or loading zone, curb. No price, turnaround or minimum is promised before we have read the count.
Field notes
Four guides from the desk, written the way we would say it on the phone to a dock lead.
Send the count
Used pallets cleared from the city and traded across the capital region. Fill in what you have; the desk reads it and answers.