About DC Used Pallets

Production, distribution and repair land is 5.2% of the District of Columbia, and most of the District’s wholesale supply comes from facilities in nearby jurisdictions. Stores and restaurants inside the city get goods on pallets and have nowhere to put them. The suburbs have the distribution centers, the plants and the grocery docks that use pallets in volume.

That gap is the business. The city clears and the suburbs trade, and the work is reading a load correctly and sending it the right way.

• We read first. A count, a size, a grade as you see it. Then a call: sale, buy-back or clear-out.
• We say what a pile is. A small mixed heap is a clear-out. We do not talk it up as money.
• We name things exactly. Grade A, Grade B, combo, core, HT. Then we explain them, in the grades and guides.
• We set pooled pallets aside. Blue and red belong to someone else.

Wooden shipping pallets: used, new, combo and heat-treated, in the standard sizes and a few odd ones. We do not deal in liquidation pallets or merchandise pallets, which are pallets of goods and not the wood they sit on. See sell and buy.

Washington, DC, suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia, from Frederick to Waldorf and from Alexandria to Front Royal. See areas.

It gives no founding year, headcount, fleet size or customer list, because none of them is something we have been given to state. What we can say is how the desk works and what the public data shows about the region.

A desk sits between sellers and buyers and reads what each has. It does not own a warehouse so large that every pile has to fill it, and it does not pretend every pile is the same. It looks at the load, matches it to a use and tells the seller what that use is.

That is the thinking behind the Pile reader and the paint-stripe key on this site. They are ways of making a quick, honest first read of a load, so the person with the pile and the person at the desk are talking about the same thing.

The trade has its own vocabulary: stringers, blocks, plugs, cores, HT. We use the words because they are exact, and we explain them because not everyone needs to know them. Each page ends with a short list of the terms it uses, so a reader can check the meaning without leaving the page.

Where a number matters, we cite the public record: county economic profiles, the DC Office of Planning, a commercial real estate report and the Census Bureau. Where we have no number, we say so. The area pages show how this works: each lists the employers and land uses the data supports and nothing we cannot back.

It does not claim a yard, a fleet or a crew of its own. It does not publish prices or turnaround. It does not show photographs of the company, because none are claimed. What it does claim is a method: read the load, say what it is worth doing with, and be plain when the answer is only a haul.

Who runs DC Used Pallets?

The desk takes requests through the form on this site. Write to info@dcusedpallets.com if you want to reach a person.

Do you deal in liquidation pallets?

No. We deal in wooden shipping pallets, not pallets of goods.