How the Pallet Buyback Program Works, and What Your Pallets Are Actually Worth
We pick up your used 48x40 cores, count them on your yard, and pay you a rebate. One to three dollars a core is the honest starting band. What moves it up or down is a shorter list than you'd expect, and none of it is a secret.
What we're actually paying for
A core is a used pallet that can be repaired. It isn't a finished pallet, and that distinction is where most of the confusion in this business lives.
Go looking online and you'll find numbers like $6 to $9 for a #1 and $3 to $6 for a #2. Those are real, but they're resale prices on a pallet that's already been repaired — sorted, torn down, re-nailed, stacked, and put back on a truck. That's the far end of the transaction. If somebody tells you your cores are worth $8 apiece, they're quoting you a number you don't own yet.
What sits between the rebate and the resale price isn't margin. Most of it is cost: freight in both directions, teardown or grinding on whatever won't repair, repair labor, boards and nails, tools and the bench they sit on, loading and unloading time, and overhead. Take those out and the spread gets thin fast.
Run it on a real yard. A plant near Calhoun generates 500 repairable 48x40 cores a month that never go back out the door. At $2 a core that's $1,000 a month and $12,000 a year on something that was headed for a pile behind the building.
Then look at what the pile costs you right now, because that's the other half of the swing. A wood pallet runs around 50 lbs, so 40 of them make a ton. Georgia tipping fees are running roughly $47 to $66 a ton depending on which landfill you're at — Tift County went to $47 on August 1, 2026, Newton County to $66 on July 1 — and they've been moving one direction. At 500 pallets you're hauling 12.5 tons, which is $590 to $825 in tipping before you've paid anybody to move it.
So the real monthly swing isn't the rebate by itself. It's $1,000 you didn't have plus $600 or $800 you stopped spending.
What moves your number up or down
Six things, and you control more of them than you'd think.
What your cores actually look like. This is the biggest lever on the list. A trailer of clean 48x40s that'll repair into #1s prices very differently from a trailer that'll only ever make #2s. Most yards are somewhere in between, and the mix is what we're grading when we walk your stacks.
What #1s and #2s are selling for this month. The rebate is derived from the resale number. When #1s soften, the rebate softens with them — and when new lumber runs hot, which it has been with low-grade up 27% since January and Canadian softwood tariffs past 40% combined, used pallets get more valuable and the rebate follows.
Freight, usually both directions. We don't normally put a pickup charge on your invoice. That's not the same thing as the truck being free — the truck is already priced into the offer we hand you. Diesel hit $5.40 a gallon earlier this year and truckload costs are up 16 to 17% year over year, so where you sit is part of the number whether it shows on the paperwork or not. We run our own fleet out of White instead of brokering it, and most of what we buy comes off the interstates north of us: I-75 from Cartersville through Dalton, Chattanooga and Cleveland up to Knoxville, I-24 out toward Manchester and Murfreesboro, I-85 into Anderson and Greenville. If you're sitting on one of those corridors, odds are we're already running past you, and the offer reflects it. Same week, most weeks.
Size mix. Anything that isn't a 48x40 stringer has to be torn down or ground, and that's labor with no repaired pallet at the end of it.
Non-pallet scrap in the load. Banding, busted crates, plastic, general trash. If it grinds, it's manageable. If it goes in our dumpster it goes to a landfill and we pay the same tipping fee you'd have paid — which means it comes out of the same number.
Loading and unloading time. A load that's stacked and ready moves in a fraction of the time of a pile somebody has to dig through, and time on your yard is time the truck isn't earning anywhere else.
What we buy, and how to get the top of the band
Regular demand sits on the 48x40 stringer, so that's where we make offers most of the time. It's the pallet with a buyer waiting.
Off sizes are a conversation worth having rather than a flat no. If your operation consistently generates 42x42 or 48x45 and you need the cores gone, ask us — if we've got a steady outlet for that size, we'll look at a rebate. If you're a mixed bag with no dominant size, we probably won't, and I'd rather tell you that on the phone than after a truck shows up at your dock.
Three habits separate the yards that get the top of the band from the ones that don't.
Sort at the dock, not at the end of the month. A mixed stack gets graded on its average, which means your good cores subsidize your broken ones. Two people pulling damaged pallets into a separate row as they come off the trailer is the highest-return habit in this whole program, and it costs nothing.
Stack in rows instead of piles. A cracked pallet buried mid-stack drags the grade of everything around it down, because the grader can't see it and has to price for the risk.
Get the grade definitions in writing before the first pickup. What counts as a #1 should be a sentence both sides agreed to in advance, not a judgment call made in your parking lot on a Tuesday morning. Ours is written down and we'll hand it to you before we ever back a truck in.
On frequency: two-way flow generally starts making sense around 500 cores a month. Under about 200 it's usually a phone call when you've built up a load rather than a standing route, and that works fine too.
Got a pile out back you want priced? Get a quote or call 770-607-0867 and we'll tell you what it's worth.
