Pallet Recycling Ontario: Where Used Pallets Should Go
The pile behind your dock started as six pallets nobody had time to deal with. Now it is forty, it has taken a parking space, and somebody has already asked what a disposal bin would cost. Before you order the bin, understand your pallet recycling Ontario options, because that pile is not garbage. Most of it is stock a recycler will pay you for. Some of it is one deck board away from going back into service. Almost none of it has to reach a landfill.
Businesses default to a bin because nobody ever told them there was an alternative. Below are four recovery routes for used pallets, in order of the value each one returns, plus what to do with the ones that are genuinely finished — written for operations and facilities people across Oxford County and Southwestern Ontario.
Stop treating pallets as waste
Used wooden pallets have four recovery routes, in order of the value they return: sell or return them through a buyback program, repair and reissue the ones that need a single fix, dismantle the rest for lumber, and grind whatever is left into shavings and mulch. Almost nothing needs a landfill.
A wood pallet is a manufactured product. Graded hardwood and softwood, cut to size, fastened to a spec, built to carry a load a set number of times. That does not stop being true when a stringer cracks. A broken pallet still holds five or six sound deck boards, and whatever is too short or too split to reuse is clean wood fibre with a market. If you are buying as well as discarding, the new vs. recycled pallets: how to choose comparison covers the other half of the loop.
Wood makes up a meaningful share of what leaves industrial and construction sites as waste, and pallets are the easiest part of that stream to divert. They arrive uniform, they stack, and they are worth the handling.
So the question is never how to throw these out. It is which recovery route each pallet belongs in.
Route 1 — Sell or return them through a buyback program
A pallet buyback program works the way scrap metal does, minus the scale. The recycler asks what you have, arranges a pickup, sorts the load on arrival, and reimburses you for the pallets that can go back into service. What you are paid depends on quantity, size, grade and condition — nothing else. Footprints in general circulation carry the most, and 48x40 most of all, because demand for it never stops.
You can raise what a pile is worth before anyone looks at it. Sort by footprint so the 48x40s are not buried under oddballs. Keep the stacks dry and off bare dirt. Keep contamination out of them — no chemical spills, no product residue, no shrink wrap or lunch garbage in the stacks. A clean, sorted, dry pile gets assessed faster.
Oxford Pallet runs this as a pallet retrieval service across Southwestern Ontario. Pickup of surplus and broken pallets is free, on Oxford’s own fleet. You share a rough count, the condition and your location. A pickup gets scheduled for a day that works. You are paid for the repairable pallets in the load. What is not repairable is ground down and used for bedding rather than landfilled. Cardboard and plastic recycling can be received at the same time.
The fleet matters more than it sounds. Because Oxford runs its own trucks and trailers out of Norwich, a pickup can often be paired with an outbound delivery. The truck is already coming to you. The return leg does the recovery work.
Route 2 — Repair and put them back into service
A surprising share of what gets written off as broken needs exactly one repair. A replaced deck board. A plug in a cracked stringer. A companion stringer nailed alongside a failed one. Repaired pallets are inspected, graded and reissued, which is why recycled pallet grades explained [→ /post/recycled-pallet-grades] is worth reading before you decide what your loads need — an AH pallet and a B pallet are both repaired stock, and they are not interchangeable.
There are two ways to use this. Send your pallets out to be repaired and returned, which keeps your own units in your own loop. Or trade them into a recycler’s stream and buy graded recycled pallets back. The second is simpler for most operations because it removes the tracking — you are no longer chasing your pallets through somebody else’s yard.
Knowing what is worth repairing saves everyone a sort. Count the breaks and note where they are. Check that the stringers are sound, since stringers carry the load and deck boards are quick to swap. Check the footprint, and check for rot, mould and staining from unknown liquids. One cracked stringer on a 48x40 is a repair. Three broken stringers and soft, blackened deck boards is dismantle stock — which is fine, it still has a route.
Route 3 — Dismantle for lumber
When a pallet cannot be repaired economically, it comes apart instead. The sound boards are pulled, de-nailed and sorted into pallet lumber. That lumber goes back out as repair stock, as components for pallets built from recovered wood, as dunnage and blocking, as crating material, and as general shop lumber for the hundred jobs a yard finds for a clean board.
This is where more of the material value sits than people expect. A pallet with a shattered stringer is still carrying most of its deck boards, and those boards are the part that gets reused first. Dismantling is not a write-off. It is a change of format. The uses for pallet lumber and reclaimed wood article covers what recovered boards get built into.
Route 4 — Grind it into animal bedding
Whatever cannot come back as lumber gets ground. Short offcuts. Broken stringers. Block ends. Nail-bearing scrap left after the boards are pulled. Ground wood becomes animal bedding — wood shavings and sawdust, screened by particle size and sold on to farms.
The metal question comes up every time. Grinding operations pull ferrous metal out magnetically, during and after the grind, which is why nail-bearing wood can still be processed. You do not need to pick nails out of a pallet before it goes on the truck.
At Oxford Wood Co., recovered pallet wood feeds two lines. One is the pallet lumber line. The other is Oxford Animal Bedding, which supplies fine and coarse wood shavings and sawdust to farms across Southwestern Ontario, in Super Sack totes or bulk by walking-floor trailer. A pallet that arrives broken leaves the site as lumber or as bedding. Between the four routes, nearly all of the material is diverted.
What NOT to do with used pallets
Burning them on site. Open-air burning rules vary by municipality in Ontario, and plenty of them restrict or prohibit it. Do not assume the rule in your township is the rule next door. Check your municipality’s open-air burning bylaw first, and remember that a fire destroys wood somebody would have paid you for.
Sending them to landfill. Broken pallet disposal by bin costs money on the way out, throws away recoverable lumber, and works against any waste-diversion target the business has committed to.
Letting them sit outdoors uncovered. Wet pallets grow mould, lose grade and lose value. The pile becomes pest habitat and a fire load against a wall that should not have one. If you need somewhere to put them in the meantime, how to store and stack pallets safely covers height limits, drainage and clearances.
Passing on contaminated pallets quietly.If a pallet carried a chemical, a spill, or a residue nobody can identify, say so. Contamination is the recycler’s problem to assess, but only if they are told about it.
Setting up a pallet recovery program in Southwestern Ontario
1. Designate a staging area that is dry, level and set back from the building, with truck access a trailer can actually reach.
2. Sort by footprint as pallets come out of production, with 48x40 separated from everything else.
3. Stack squarely and cap the stacks at a height your people can handle safely.
4. Keep broken pallets in their own stack, so a recycler can assess repairable and grind-bound separately without restacking your yard.
5. Agree on a pickup cadence that matches how fast you generate volume, instead of calling once the pile is a problem.
6. Track the count or the tonnage leaving on each pickup, so landfill diversion wood waste numbers are something you can report instead of estimate.
From Norwich, that covers Woodstock, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg, London, Brantford, Kitchener–Waterloo, Cambridge, Hamilton, Stratford, St. Thomas and Simcoe. Because cardboard and plastic recycling can be received alongside pallets, one stop can clear more than one stream out of your yard.
Pallet Recycling Ontario: Frequently Asked Questions
Will anyone pick up used pallets in Ontario?
Yes. Recyclers collect used pallets from businesses across Southwestern Ontario. Oxford Pallet’s pallet retrieval service picks up surplus and broken pallets free of charge on its own fleet, pays you for the repairable pallets in the load, and grinds what cannot be repaired into bedding material instead of sending it to a landfill.
Do broken pallets get recycled or thrown out?
Recycled, almost all of it. Repairable pallets are bought back and returned to service first. The rest is dismantled so the sound boards become pallet lumber, and what remains is ground into wood shavings and sawdust for animal bedding, after magnetic metal separation. Very little of a broken pallet needs a landfill.
Can I burn old pallets?
Do not assume you can. Open-air burning rules vary by municipality across Ontario, and many restrict or prohibit it outright. Burning also creates air-quality and fire-safety problems. Check your municipality’s open-air burning bylaw before you consider it, and use a recovery route instead.
How should I store pallets waiting for pickup?
On level ground, up off the dirt, sorted by footprint, stacked squarely and capped at a controlled height. Keep them under cover if you have cover, and on well-drained ground if you do not. Dry pallets hold their grade and their value. Wet pallets grow mould and lose both.
Book a Pallet Pickup or Get a Quote
Tell us what you have — a rough count, the condition, and where you are — and we will schedule a pickup and assess the repairable pallets in the load. Nothing usable is wasted at our end: repairable pallets go back into service, sound boards become pallet lumber, and the rest is ground into shavings and sawdust for farms across the region. Our own fleet makes it easy to pair your pickup with a delivery already heading your way.
Request a quote or call 519-468-3400 to get a pallet pickup on the schedule.
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