A court battle ensued. The helicopter allowed CHEP to produce aerial prints of Mock’s pallet yard, which were introduced as evidence at trial. The federal district court for northern Georgia remarked that CHEP went to “enormous effort and expense” to reclaim its pallets, “despite the undisputed fact that many of the pallets were in a greatly deteriorated condition.” Elton Potts, at the time CHEP’s senior vice-president for asset management, took the stand and explained, “We have used the phrase, ‘Never leave a pallet behind.’” Under questioning from the bench, Potts said that he would rather destroy a CHEP pallet than allow it to fall into the wrong hands. The jury determined that CHEP owed Mock more than half a million dollars—about $14 per pallet—for the return of its property. After CHEP appealed, the award was reduced to $5 per pallet, which still amounted to far more than CHEP had ever paid a recycler.10 “We stood up for what is right for our industry,” Mock told the trade magazine Pallet Enterprise, which followed the trial closely. “We put our trust in God. Bathed it in prayer.”11

• • •

There were other battles—in San Antonio, a recycler who refused to hand over CHEP pallets was marched out of his yard in handcuffs, and had his forklifts impounded—and other trials, the results of which have not been entirely conclusive. Courts have generally affirmed CHEP’s right to reclaim its pallets, but the question of whether and how much to compensate recyclers depends on the specifics of the case and the particularities of state law. Currently, CHEP pays recyclers $1.25 for the return of a pallet, plus up to $1.75 more if the recycler transports the pallet to a CHEP depot.12 Most recyclers grumble, but accept the arrangement. Unless they want to pick a fight, they have little choice: they receive blue pallets whether they want them or not, and if they sell them on the black market, or grind them into mulch, or do anything other than return them to CHEP, they are inviting the wrath of the company’s asset recovery team.

What is most vexing to many recyclers is the belief that the accumulation of blue pallets in their yards is not an accident, but a deliberate CHEP strategy. After all, collecting these stray pallets takes a lot of labor, a lot of miles, and a lot of trucks. If you are CHEP, why do this work yourself if you can get someone else to do it for you, at a price that you dictate? In 2008, a group of recyclers filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that CHEP was leveraging its dominant market position, and violating anti-trust law, by transferring its operational costs onto recyclers. The recyclers argued that CHEP had made them into a “conscripted collection army.” CHEP hired excellent lawyers, and the case was ultimately dismissed. Then and now, the company has maintained that its relationship with recyclers is mutually beneficial.13

A good place to study this dynamic is Hunts Point, an industrial neighborhood in the Bronx that happens to be the pallet capital of New York City. There are half a dozen recycling yards here, all within walking distance of a wholesale market where most of the city’s fresh food arrives. (This is no accident; if you are in a strange city looking for pallets, follow the groceries.) The yards are open to the sky, surrounded by high concrete walls, and filled with towers of pallets, which are arranged in clusters like groups of skyscrapers. The feeling is intensely architectural. All day, drivers zoom around on forklift trucks, moving stacks of pallets, and the towers rise and fall.

The larger yards have dozens of workers and various intriguing machines. One of the smaller yards, and the only one in the Bronx owned by a Dominican family, is Palletteen Pallets. Palletteen consists of a yard about half the size of a football field, a shed that serves as an office, a Snapple machine that sits on the sidewalk, on top of a pallet, and five pallet repair workstations, which are protected from the rain by corrugated tin roofs. The owner, Gabriel Solis, told me that business hasn’t been this bad in ten years. “The blues are a problem,” he said. “Plastic is another problem.”

Gabriel’s nephew Dari showed me his forklift truck, which had his name spray-painted across the back. He’s been moving pallets around, he told me, since middle school. All morning, trucks pulled up in front of the yard and disgorged pallets onto the sidewalk. There were some blues, a red—the property of a much smaller rental company, called PECO—and many varieties of whites, in various states of repair. Dari and his uncles whizzed about on their forklifts, slicing and dividing and recombining the stacks, until like was with like. At one point, Dari, Gabriel, and Gabriel’s brother Henry all had stacks of pallets balanced high in the air on their forks, and they converged to execute a three-way aerial sort. It was a forklift ballet. Henry looked over and winked.

Inside the yard, workers at the repair stations operated on whitewood pallets, prying off damaged boards and nailing down new ones. Dari kept tallies on a piece of cardboard. Each of these pallets would resell for somewhere between $2.50 and $5.00, he said, depending on its condition. As the day wore on, stacks of repaired pallets grew higher around each station. They had stray markings and bits of color: a thick blue line, a spray-painted pink “3.” The newer blond boards stood out against the old ones. One pallet had the words “Vincent Rutigliano Importer & Distributor of Italian Food Specialties” impressed on its side in an elegant script. These were the kind of pallets that Stuart Keeler would like, I thought: they were accreting history, and character, as they aged. They were palimpsests. Nearby was a stack of blues, blocky and uniform, waiting for a pickup by CHEP. If they had a history, it had been wiped clean, or painted over.

• • •

By 2002, there were ten million blue pallets floating around the US, unaccounted for, and a report by Credit Suisse warned investors that CHEP usa was experiencing “a loss of control of [its] pallet pool.”14 Less than a month later, Bob Moore left the company.

Despite these lost pallets, CHEP continued to grow. In 2010, in a shock to the industry, Costco announced that it would only accept shipments on CHEP-style block pallets: they break less, they have tighter quality controls, and full four-way entry promises tiny but measurable efficiencies when loading and unloading trucks. Panic ensued in the world of whitewood. “If we don’t do something now, we are all going to be out of business,” John Swenby, the president of Paltech Enterprises, told Pallet Enterprise. Swenby and others have launched an industry collaborative, called 9Bloc, which aims to create a new, open pool of whitewood block pallets, with specs and quality control equivalent to CHEP’s. But because block pallets cost much more to produce than those made with stringers, the economics favor rental companies.15

Meanwhile, other disturbances threatened whitewood. In 2006, an upstart company called iGPS declared that the future of pallets had arrived, and it was neither blue nor white, but plastic. These plastic pallets were expensive to produce, but they promised to be strong, uniform, clean, and individually trackable by way of embedded radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags. The man who had put together the business plan, sold it to investors, and now led iGPS was none other than Bob Moore.