Pallets? What Pallets?

Last week NOLS was hit with the yearly flood of catalogs—55,000 of them, and 15,000 yet to come. While the clear plastic, cardboard boxes and paper wrappings are all easily recycled, what about the 18 wooden pallets they arrived on?
Believe it or not, wooden pallets are recyclable, and fairly easily, too. Each year in the aftermath of Catalog Day, NOLS Rocky Mountain Facilities Manager Latane Frank collects the pallets that are no longer fit for duty and hauls them off to the Lander landfill to be shredded and recycled into compost. The pallets are thrown into the wood and yard waste pile where a machine then scoops them up, drops them into a shredder and produces a fresh pile of mulch, which you can purchase for your own use. Just like that, they’re gone—vanished and on their way to a flowerbed near you.
Pallets aren’t the only wood product that can be recycled. Old furniture, packing crates, and particleboard can all be ground up and reused. For more information on wood recycling visit American Forest and Paper.