We started with one bay and a dismantling bar

The problem we noticed first

In 2009 there was a manufacturer in Sharonville paying a waste hauler to take away pallets, and a distributor four miles up the road paying a broker to bring pallets in. Both invoices were being signed every month by companies that had never spoken to each other. That gap — paying at both ends of the same piece of wood — is the entire reason this business exists.

We started by doing the least glamorous half: collecting. One box truck, a dismantling bar, and a standing offer to take away anything wooden. The repairs came second, because once you have a pile of broken pallets in a bay, it becomes obvious very quickly how many of them are not actually broken.

What we learned in the first three years

Three things, all of which still shape how we operate. The first is that most pallets written off as scrap need one deck board. The second is that a truck carrying wood one direction and air the other has doubled the cost and the emissions of everything on it. The third is that the industry’s vocabulary is unreliable — one yard’s A grade is another’s B — and that every dispute we have ever had traced back to somebody assuming a word meant what they thought it meant.

So we wrote our rejection criteria down and posted them at both grading stations. We built dispatch around a single question asked before any load is assigned: what comes back? And we stopped guessing.

Why there is no phone number

This surprises people, so it is worth explaining properly. We took our phone line out in 2016. Not to be difficult, and not to save money — but because the pattern of every serious problem we had in the first seven years was identical: a verbal agreement remembered differently by two people a month later.

Everything at Pallets Recycle now happens in writing. Quotes, confirmations, tally sheets, treatment records, complaints. It means our written quotes are unusually detailed, because they have to carry the whole conversation. It means you can forward a quote to your finance team without retyping it. And it means that when something goes wrong — which it does — we can both read exactly what was agreed rather than argue about it.

Some customers hate it for the first month. Almost none of them go back.

What we will not do

• We do not metal-plate a cracked stringer. It is fast, it is cheap, and it puts a hard steel edge into a wood structure that will eventually catch on a conveyor or scratch a painted panel.
• We do not grind chemically treated, painted or methyl-bromide-stamped wood into any product sold for landscape or animal use.
• We do not quote freight inside a unit price to make the unit price look better. It is a separate line because it is a separate cost, and hiding it prevents you from making the decision that actually saves money.
• We do not claim national coverage. Transport is the dominant emissions cost in a recycled pallet’s life, and a pallet trucked 400 miles undoes much of the point of recycling it.
• We do not sell you a higher grade than the application needs. It is the most common and most expensive habit in pallet purchasing and it is easy money for suppliers who stay quiet about it.

Where we are now

10400 Evendale Dr, Cincinnati, OH 45241 — the same street, a much larger footprint. Two grading lines, a repair bench floor, a dismantling line with magnetic separation on both the discharge and the grinder outfeed, a kiln for ISPM-15 treatment, a colouring and screening plant for landscape products, and a studio at the back where wood too old and too good to grind becomes something else.

Roughly 120 trailer movements a week. Seventy-eight percent of our outbound miles carry a paying return load. Four hundred and eighty active collection sites across Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. And a zero-landfill commitment that we report on by weight rather than by adjective.