59 of America's largest retailers and distributors. Not one publishes a wood diversion rate.

• 10 publish wood as weight. Tons or pounds, in their own report.
• 6 publish a unit count, next to materials they weigh to the ton.
• 43 publish no wood figure, including 7 with no report at all.
• None publishes a wood diversion rate. That needs the wood diverted and the wood sent to landfill. No company publishes the second half.

Seventeen of the 59 have ever put a number on wood. Sixteen are in the table. The seventeenth is Amazon, whose only pallet number counts pallets avoided, not pallets handled.

Against each company's previous report: 10 published again, 4 published for the first time, and 2 dropped theirs. One of the two is the largest pallet count in American retail, published once, on a page that was live in September 2025 and returns a 404 today.

A number no standard asks for is a number nobody has to keep.

Its waste page, archived 7 September 2025, names three streams: “cardboard, wood pallets, plastics.” It weighs two of them: 5.8 billion pounds of cardboard and 280 million pounds of plastic film and rigid plastics. The pallets get a count, 139 million, two headings away.

That is not an oversight. Cardboard and film are sold by weight, so somebody weighs them. A pallet is handed off by count, so somebody counts it. The number that exists is the number the paperwork was built to carry.

“Excluding pallets, our diversion rate would be 78%.” With pallets, it is 85%. UNFI (Impact Report FY2025) is the only company of the 59 that shows this.

But that is a share of total waste, not of wood. It says pallets are heavy. It does not say where they went. UNFI's own row sits under “no wood figure appears.”

Each company, the wood figure in its current report, how that compares with its previous edition, and a link to the document. HELD, ADDED and DROPPED describe the document, never the company's performance. Counts are listed apart from weights because the two cannot be added, and only a weight can enter a diversion rate.

This is nobody's fault. Pallets have plenty of paperwork. It was never built to answer this question.

• Cardboard is sold on a weight. A pallet leaves on a count. Cardboard is weighed when the buyer takes it, because money moves on the weight. Pallets leave on a bill of lading that names a count and a consignee.
• Cardboard has one outcome. A pallet has three. Back into service, torn down for material, or landfill. A person decides, one pallet at a time, at another site, after the truck has gone.
• The count comes back. The reason does not. The money depends on the count, so the count makes the return trip. Nothing was built to carry the reason.

So a company can publish a pallet count and still not produce a rate. The companies above deserve credit for what they publish. The gap is in a form the whole industry inherited.

The fix is not a scale or a sensor. It is a line on a document that already exists. As a load comes off the trailer, a grader reads every pallet and decides its future in seconds. Nobody has ever asked them to write it down.

Our bill of lading carries a line for it. The yard writes the load's counts and marks the reason with a single letter. That paperwork already came back, because the rebate is figured off the count. Now it brings the reason with it.

• What the BOL says today: Scrap 214. A count and a signature. No destination, no reason.
• What ours says: 214 units, a reason code on each, with site, date and disposition, rolled up across every yard servicing the site, every month.

How the weight is arrived at: pallets are graded and counted at the load, not weighed at the dock. Weight is converted from the count at a per-pallet basis printed on the report next to the figure, the same standard this page holds 59 other companies to.

Download the census data

• Why we publish this. Pallet Solutions runs managed pallet programs, and the reporting this page says is missing is something we sell. We have an interest in the finding, so every figure links to the company's own document. Check the sources, not the author.
• What we did. Opened each company's most recent published waste disclosure at the source (reports, appendices and data tables) and recorded what appears for wood and pallets.
• Who is on the list. Large US retailers and distributors, screened for size and pallet intensity, whether or not they take part. Nobody can buy, request or decline a place. The way onto this page with a figure is to publish one.
• "Publishes" means a wood or pallet figure appears in the company's own current public document, quoted as published, in its own units.
• "Does not appear" means we opened the document named in that row on the screening date and did not find one. It is a statement about a document, not about what a company measures internally. Where a document could not be reached, the row says so.
• "Wood diversion rate" means wood diverted over wood generated. Ten companies publish wood diverted by weight and several publish an all-material rate, but none publishes the wood that went to landfill. An all-material rate is not a wood rate.
• Dates. Every row was opened at source between 13 and 24 July 2026, anchored on the 2025 reporting cycle: each company's most recent report published in 2025 or 2026. Where the latest document is older, the row says so. This is a survey of 59 US giants, not a claim of completeness.
• Year over year. Whether a wood or pallet figure appears this cycle and last. Where both editions carry one, the change is stated and not interpreted: a larger number can mean more waste, better measurement or a bigger business. The prior-year pass covers the 17 companies with a figure in either cycle; the rest were screened for the current cycle only.
• Open the source first. This page is a reading of public documents on a stated date. The company's own report is the authority.

Wrong, outdated or missed a figure? Tell us at robert.gregg@palletsolutionsusa.com. We check it the same week, correct the row and credit whoever caught it. If a company wants context next to its row, send it and we will link it. Every row has a permanent link you can cite, and the whole table downloads as a CSV.

The weekly pallet market brief, and next year's census when it lands. Two minutes, every Tuesday. Free.