Kamps Pallets Just Proved Something Everyone Assumed Was Impossible

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-08-25 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

I was reading through some recycling trade reports last week and stumbled on something genuinely odd. A pallet company—Kamps, Inc.—actually certified two of its facilities as zero waste.

Not in marketing speak. Actually certified.

Zero Waste USA issued the certification to Kamps' Detroit and Taylor, Michigan operations in December 2025. The Detroit facility hit 98 percent material diversion. Taylor managed 97 percent. Both facilities did it without incineration, which means they're not cheating by burning waste and calling it "energy recovery."

I know what you're thinking. That's a pallet company, not metals or manufacturing. Fair point. But what they did matters because it shows something everyone keeps saying is impossible—actually stopping waste at scale—might not be complete fiction.

The bar is fairly straightforward. Zero Waste International Alliance standards require diverting more than 90 percent of materials away from landfills and incineration, including waste-to-energy. Simple math, difficult execution. Kamps exceeded it.

Here's the thing that caught me: Kamps is the first pallet company in the United States to pull this off through Zero Waste USA's program. Not because pallet recycling is some revolutionary new process. They've been doing the same work for fifty years, more or less. Repair damaged pallets, recover the metal fasteners, sell off the wood fiber for mulch or biomass.

Actually, let me correct that. It's not that they found some clever workaround. It's that pallets are almost entirely recoverable material to begin with—wood, metal, plastic. Nothing exotic. No hazardous residues coating the edges. The operational reality is just cleaner than, say, electronics or automotive recycling.

But here's what I found interesting in the details. The combined facilities diverted 69,619 tons of material in a given period, mostly wood but including metal, plastic, and industrial components. That's not academic. That's volume.

The company's founder, Bernie Kamps, started in 1973 by pulling pallets from landfills, fixing them up, and sending them back out. The philosophy was straight: waste is just a resource in the wrong place. The certification validates it, yes. But the model worked decades before anyone was handing out badges for it.

What this tells me is that zero waste certification isn't some magical endpoint you sprint toward. It's a way to document what you're actually doing, make the numbers transparent, and communicate the whole thing to your customers and partners. For a recycler or remanufacturer, that's useful. You can prove performance instead of making promises.

The metals and zinc trade doesn't work the same way as pallet recycling, obviously. We deal with different material streams, different recovery processes, different markets. But the lesson translates: if you're already managing recovery properly, certification is just formalizing what you know.

Makes you wonder what else we're not measuring because we haven't bothered to check.

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