Are plastic pallets more sustainable than wooden pallets?

It depends on which impact you mean. On carbon, the peer-reviewed life cycle assessments that compare the two find wood ahead: a 2020 Penn State study put a heat-treated wooden pallet at 71.8% lower carbon than plastic on a single trip, and wood stayed ahead over 100,000 trips. On lumber, a reusable plastic pallet that stays in rotation replaces many wooden pallets over its life, so the lumber in those pallets is never cut. That displacement is the claim this page makes, and it holds only for pallets that keep coming back.

How many trips does a plastic pallet last compared with a wooden pallet?

In a durability test at Virginia Tech's packaging laboratory, commissioned by a pallet manufacturer in 2023, a whitewood stringer pallet failed after an average of 11 handling cycles and the plastic pallet completed 280 without failure. Peer-reviewed life cycle studies assume fewer real-world cycles on both sides, around 20 for wood and 66 for plastic. The calculator on this page runs on either basis, and defaults to 100 trips for plastic rather than the 280 recorded.

How much wood goes into a wooden pallet?

The pallet industry's own design specification for a standard 48 by 40 inch stringer pallet in mixed eastern hardwoods calls for 13.1 board feet of new lumber; lighter designs use about 10. In 2016 pallet production took 43% of the hardwood lumber sawn in the United States, and in 2021 the industry used 38% of all sawn lumber, about 17.9 billion board feet, to build an estimated 919 million new pallets.

Are plastic pallets recyclable?

Yes, with a condition. Our pallets are moulded in HDPE and polypropylene, both of which can be ground into flake and moulded again, and manufacturers run take-back programmes that turn worn pallets into new ones. Whether that happens depends on the unit being collected at end of life, so ask your supplier what happens to a worn pallet. We do not currently publish a recycled-content percentage or run a published take-back programme, and we would rather say so than describe one that does not exist yet.

How many trees does switching to plastic pallets save?

It is arithmetic rather than a promise, and the calculator on this page shows its working. One thousand reusable pallets at 100 trips each, against 11 for wood, do the work of about 9,091 wooden pallets. At 13 board feet each that is about 118,000 board feet of lumber never cut, and at 320 board feet to a mature hardwood sawtimber tree it is 369 trees left standing. Change the order size or the service-life basis and the figures change with it.

Sustainability

Reusable plastic pallets and the forest: the argument, with its working

Pallets took 43% of the hardwood lumber sawn in the United States in 20161 and 38% of all sawn lumber in 2021.2 A pallet that stays in service is a pallet that is never remade. That is the whole argument on this page. Every input to it is here with its source, and so is the evidence that cuts the other way.

Watch the film3:45 Run the numbers

The forest argument in four minutes

Nine scenes. Every figure is sourced on screen and again on this page, and the carbon evidence is stated plainly rather than left for you to find.

In this film

Run the numbers for your own order

Pick the order size and the basis for service life. The result is lumber displaced and trees left standing, never carbon saved, and the four inputs sit under it with their sources.

Order size

Service life basis

Virginia Tech FasTrack test, 2023: 11 cycles for wood; plastic ran to 280, 100 is used.

Plastic pallets
1,000
Put into rotation
Wood pallets
9,091
Never built
Board feet
118,182
Never cut
Trees
369
Left standing

The four inputs

Service life of a plastic pallet, conservative100 trips: Virginia Tech FasTrack test, 2023: 11 cycles for wood; plastic ran to 280, 100 is used.
Service life of a wood pallet11 trips: Virginia Tech FasTrack test, 2023: 11 cycles for wood; plastic ran to 280, 100 is used.
Lumber in a 48 x 40 wood pallet13 board feet: NWPCA Pallet Design System specification for a 48 x 40 stringer pallet: 13.1 board feet, rounded down. Lighter designs use about 10 board feet. The specification figure is used, rounded down.
Lumber from one mature hardwood tree320 board feet: Ohio State University Extension tree volume tables, International quarter-inch rule: 18 in diameter, three 16 ft logs. A mature sawtimber tree. Yield varies with species, diameter, log count and mill practice.

Three steps, no hidden factor

The calculation is deliberately simple enough to check on paper. If a supplier cannot show you theirs, that is worth knowing too.

01
Wood pallets displaced
plastic units × (plastic trips ÷ wood trips)
Over its service life one plastic pallet does the work of several wood ones. That many wood pallets are never built.
02
Lumber not cut
wood pallets displaced × board feet per pallet
Each wood pallet that is never built is a quantity of sawn lumber that is never milled.
03
Trees left standing
board feet saved ÷ board feet per tree
Converted at the sawn yield of one mature hardwood sawtimber tree. The result is rounded down.

Where the lumber goes

The pallet industry's own surveys, run with Virginia Tech and the United States Forest Service, measure how much sawn lumber becomes pallets. The share is large and the total has grown.

Stacks of freshly sawn hardwood boards in a sawmill yard under flat overcast light, with a log deck behind them — Most pallet lumber is low-grade logs and cants, and since 2016 the larger share has been softwood. The arithmetic on this page is about hardwood sawtimber and is illustrative, not a forestry model.

Share of US hardwood lumber that went into pallets in 20161: 43%Gerber et al., 2020, from the industry survey sponsored by the NWPCA.
Share of US sawn lumber that went into pallets in 20212: 38%Hobbs, Horvath and Gething, 2025.
Lumber used for pallets in the US in 20212: 17.9 billionboard feetHobbs, Virginia Tech, 2023 thesis behind the 2025 survey paper.
New wood pallets built in the US in 20212: 919 millionHobbs, Horvath and Gething, 2025.
Pallets in service in the US, more than nine in ten of them wood10: 1.8 to 3.1 billionUSDA Forest Service, 2021, and a Freedonia estimate for 2019.

How many trips a pallet survives decides everything

Two bases are published here because they give different answers. One is a sponsored durability test on a laboratory handling sequence; the other is what peer-reviewed life cycle studies assume about real-world use.

Durability test, 20234

Wooden pallet11 trips

Reusable plastic pallet280 trips

A ten-step handling sequence at Virginia Tech, commissioned by a pallet manufacturer. Wood is the average cycle at failure; plastic ran to the figure shown without failing. The calculator defaults to 100 trips for plastic, marked on the bar, not the 280 recorded.

Life-cycle study assumptions, 20218

Wooden pallet20 trips

Reusable plastic pallet66 trips

What a peer-reviewed assessment assumed for real-world cycles: 5 to 30 for wood and 50 to 100 for plastic, with these as the central values.

A pile of broken, weathered wooden pallets stacked against a steel fence at a recycling yard — Where a wooden pallet goes after its last trip. The pallet that is never built never arrives here, which is what displacement means.

Every input, and where it comes from

The four coefficients the calculator runs on, as published, with the source each was read from and the caveat that goes with it.

Coefficients used in the forest impact calculation and their sources
Input	Value	Source and caveat
Service life of a plastic pallet, conservative	100 trips	The same Virginia Tech test ran the plastic pallet to 280 cycles without failure. The calculation uses 100. Deliberately conservative. The measured case is available in the calculator.4
Service life of a wood pallet	11 trips	Virginia Tech FasTrack durability test, 2023: a whitewood stringer pallet failed after an average of 11 handling cycles. A sponsored durability test on a ten-step handling sequence. Peer-reviewed LCAs assume 5 to 30 real-world cycles for wood.4
Lumber in a 48 x 40 wood pallet	13 board feet	NWPCA Pallet Design System specification for a 48 x 40 stringer pallet: 13.1 board feet, rounded down. Lighter designs use about 10 board feet. The specification figure is used, rounded down.3
Lumber from one mature hardwood tree	320 board feet	Ohio State University Extension tree volume tables, International quarter-inch rule: 18 in diameter, three 16 ft logs. A mature sawtimber tree. Yield varies with species, diameter, log count and mill practice.5

These are United States figures. Canadian forestry data is being reviewed and this page will be restated against it rather than quietly relabelled.

What this argument does not cover

It is not a carbon claim. A peer-reviewed life cycle assessment from Penn State found conventionally heat-treated wooden pallets carried a carbon footprint 71.8% lower than plastic on a one-trip basis, and wood stayed ahead on a 100,000-trip basis.6 An Australian study in 2022 put plastic at 216 kg of CO2 equivalent to complete 100 trips against 144 for wood.7 Independent assessments since have found the same. On carbon, wood wins, and this page does not say otherwise.

It depends on the pallet coming back. The arithmetic assumes units stay in rotation. In a closed loop, between your own sites or with a regular customer, that holds. On a one-way export shipment it does not, and we will say so rather than quote you the same number.

The inputs vary. Laboratory handling cycles are not real-world trips, tree yield varies with species and diameter, and pallet lumber is mostly low-grade logs. Where a range exists the cautious end is used, and the table above says which end that was.

A close-up of shredded HDPE plastic regrind flakes, mostly pale grey with a few blue and green pieces — At the end of its life
The catalogue is moulded in HDPE and PP, and construction systems run PP and ABS. A worn unit is ground into flake and moulded again, and manufacturers run take-back programmes that turn old pallets into new ones.9 That depends on the unit being collected, so ask what happens to a worn one. Individual material grades are published on every product page.
We do not currently publish a recycled-content percentage or operate a published take-back programme, and we would rather leave that blank here than describe one that does not exist yet.
Request a quotation Browse plastic pallets

Questions buyers ask before they repeat any of this

Answered from the sources on this page, and hedged where the honest answer is that it depends.

Are plastic pallets more sustainable than wooden pallets?
It depends on which impact you mean. On carbon, the peer-reviewed life cycle assessments that compare the two find wood ahead: a 2020 Penn State study put a heat-treated wooden pallet at 71.8% lower carbon than plastic on a single trip, and wood stayed ahead over 100,000 trips. On lumber, a reusable plastic pallet that stays in rotation replaces many wooden pallets over its life, so the lumber in those pallets is never cut. That displacement is the claim this page makes, and it holds only for pallets that keep coming back.
How many trips does a plastic pallet last compared with a wooden pallet?
In a durability test at Virginia Tech's packaging laboratory, commissioned by a pallet manufacturer in 2023, a whitewood stringer pallet failed after an average of 11 handling cycles and the plastic pallet completed 280 without failure. Peer-reviewed life cycle studies assume fewer real-world cycles on both sides, around 20 for wood and 66 for plastic. The calculator on this page runs on either basis, and defaults to 100 trips for plastic rather than the 280 recorded.
How much wood goes into a wooden pallet?
The pallet industry's own design specification for a standard 48 by 40 inch stringer pallet in mixed eastern hardwoods calls for 13.1 board feet of new lumber; lighter designs use about 10. In 2016 pallet production took 43% of the hardwood lumber sawn in the United States, and in 2021 the industry used 38% of all sawn lumber, about 17.9 billion board feet, to build an estimated 919 million new pallets.
Are plastic pallets recyclable?
Yes, with a condition. Our pallets are moulded in HDPE and polypropylene, both of which can be ground into flake and moulded again, and manufacturers run take-back programmes that turn worn pallets into new ones. Whether that happens depends on the unit being collected at end of life, so ask your supplier what happens to a worn pallet. We do not currently publish a recycled-content percentage or run a published take-back programme, and we would rather say so than describe one that does not exist yet.
How many trees does switching to plastic pallets save?
It is arithmetic rather than a promise, and the calculator on this page shows its working. One thousand reusable pallets at 100 trips each, against 11 for wood, do the work of about 9,091 wooden pallets. At 13 board feet each that is about 118,000 board feet of lumber never cut, and at 320 board feet to a mature hardwood sawtimber tree it is 369 trees left standing. Change the order size or the service-life basis and the figures change with it.

Sources

Every figure on this page and in the film carries one of these numbers. Checked on 6 October 2026. Where a publisher's page is paywalled, the link goes to the open repository copy.

1
Gerber, Horvath, Araman and Gething, 2020
Investigation of New and Recovered Wood Shipping Platforms in the United States, BioResources 15(2). Pallets took 43% of the 9.5 billion board feet of hardwood lumber sawn in the US in 2016; about 513 million new wood pallets were built that year.
bioresources.cnr.ncsu.edu/resources/investigation-of-new-and-recovered-wood-shipping-platforms-in-the-united-states/ (opens in a new tab)
2
Hobbs, Horvath and Gething, 2025
Investigation of the status of the wooden pallet market during the COVID-19 pandemic, BioResources 20(2). The industry used 38% of US sawn lumber in 2021 and built an estimated 919 million new pallets; the 2023 Virginia Tech thesis behind it puts total pallet lumber at 17.9 billion board feet.
bioresources.cnr.ncsu.edu/resources/investigation-of-the-status-of-the-wooden-pallet-market-during-the-covd-19-pandemic/ (opens in a new tab)
3
National Wooden Pallet and Container Association, Pallet Design System, 2023
Sample specification for a 48 x 40 stringer-class pallet in mixed eastern hardwoods, as published by a member mill in 2023: 13.1 board feet of new lumber. Lighter designs use about 10.
www.palletdesignsystem.com/ (opens in a new tab)
4
Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design, FasTrack durability test commissioned by ORBIS, 2023
A whitewood stringer pallet failed after an average of 11 handling cycles of a ten-step sequence; the plastic pallet under test completed 280 cycles without failure. A sponsored durability test, not an independent study.
www.packagingdive.com/news/pallet-sustainability-wood-plastic-esg-study-recycling-reuse-materials/651051/ (opens in a new tab)
5
Ohio State University Extension, Measuring Standing Trees, fact sheet F-35, 2024
International quarter-inch rule: a hardwood of 18 inches diameter at breast height carrying three 16-foot logs scales 320 board feet. A mature sawtimber tree, not a mid-sized one.
cfaes.osu.edu/fact-sheet/measuring-standing-trees (opens in a new tab)
6
Anil, Ma, Kremer, Ray and Shahidi, Penn State, 2020
Life cycle assessment comparison of wooden and plastic pallets in the grocery industry, Journal of Industrial Ecology 24(4). Conventionally heat-treated wooden pallets carried a 71.8% lower carbon footprint than plastic on a one-trip basis, and wood stayed ahead on a 100,000-trip basis.
pure.psu.edu/en/publications/life-cycle-assessment-comparison-of-wooden-and-plastic-pallets-in/ (opens in a new tab)
7
Weththasinghe, Akash, Harding, Subhani and Wijayasundara, Deakin University, 2022
Carbon footprint of wood and plastic as packaging materials: an Australian case of pallets, Journal of Cleaner Production 363. Plastic pallets at 216 kg CO2e to complete 100 trips against 144 for wood, cradle to grave.
vuir.vu.edu.au/43616 (opens in a new tab)
8
Khan, Deviatkin, Havukainen and Horttanainen, 2021
Life cycle assessment of pallets, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 26(8). Assumed 20 cycles for a wooden pallet (range 5 to 30) and 66 for plastic (range 50 to 100); the virgin-resin plastic pallet had the highest impact in both attributional and consequential assessments.
lutpub.lut.fi/handle/10024/163090 (opens in a new tab)
9
Packaging Dive, 2023
End-of-life practice for HDPE pallets: units are ground into flake and moulded into new products, including pallets and bulk bins, under manufacturer take-back programmes.
www.packagingdive.com/news/pallet-sustainability-wood-plastic-esg-study-recycling-reuse-materials/651051/ (opens in a new tab)
10
Alanya-Rosenbaum, Bergman and Gething, USDA Forest Service, 2021; Freedonia via Hobbs et al., 2025
US pallets in service: more than 1.8 billion (USDA Forest Products Laboratory, 2021) to 3.1 billion (Freedonia estimate for 2019). Over 90% are wood.
research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/63069 (opens in a new tab)

Questions about the method go to support@drpolysystems.com.