Broken pallets out of your Orlando yard

How to tell it is a disposal job

• The stringers or blocks are cracked or missing, not just a board or two.
• Boards are rotten, mouldy or too wet to dry.
• The stack is a tangle with no sorting possible.
• The grade sheet reads core on a sample pallet, and the recycler has no use for what is left.

Where broken wood goes

Irreparable wood may be chipped for mulch, composite products or biomass. That is the preferred end for a broken stack, and a recycler can say whether a given pile qualifies.

Do not hold it back

Broken pallets leaning against a wall absorb summer rain, grow mould. If you plan to clear them, the earlier the better. Wood below 20 percent moisture will not support decay fungi, so a dry stack waits longer than a wet one.

How much of a pile is really broken

Broken is a narrower word than damaged. In the Forest Service survey even the roughest sorted group, Grade C, averaged fewer than two stringer repairs per pallet, so a worn pallet is not by itself a lost one. A pallet is broken when its frame cannot take a repair: a rotten block, a stringer split along its length or more than one broken stringer.

Sorting a broken pile in ten minutes

1. Lay a dozen pallets flat and push on each corner. A pallet that rocks or flexes has a failed stringer.
2. Press a thumb into the ends of the boards. Soft wood that crumbles is rot.
3. Set aside any pallet with only a split deck board: that is a repair job.
4. Count the remainder. That is the disposal pile.

Before the truck arrives

• Stack broken pallets flat and square so a forklift can lift them in a block.
• Separate the metal: strapping, brackets and loose nails.
• Keep wet and dry piles apart; wet wood weighs more.
• Mark any pallets that belong to someone else.

How rot looks

Brown-rot fungi leave wood dark and cracked across the grain into small cubes that crumble in the hand. White-rot fungi leave it pale, stringy and soft. Either one at the end of a stringer or a block means the pallet cannot be repaired, because a nail will not hold in wood that has lost its fibre. Rot starts where wood stays wet, which in a Florida yard is the bottom boards of a stack that sits on soil.

Termites and soil contact

Termites feed on wood that touches the ground and stays damp. A stack left on bare soil gives them food and cover, and the damage shows as hollow stringers and boards that look whole but give under a thumb. Raising a stack on timbers or a concrete pad, even for a few weeks, removes that contact and slows both rot and insects.