MSW (municipal solid waste)
Everyday trash from homes, businesses and institutions, as distinct from industrial or C&D waste.
Municipal solid waste is the everyday waste stream from households, businesses, schools and institutions, collected and handled by municipal systems or private haulers. EPA's Facts and Figures series measures MSW nationally, and wood pallets appear in it as wood containers and packaging.
The distinction matters for pallet rules. North Carolina's pallet ban applies to landfills generally but exempts landfills permitted to accept only construction and demolition debris, and the state's environment department describes it as a ban on disposal in municipal solid waste landfills.
Virginia Tech's 2016 landfill survey, the basis for the industry's pallet landfill estimates, surveyed MSW facilities; C&D landfills were estimated separately. See landfilled pallets, 1998 vs 2016.
Pallets thrown out with a business's ordinary trash end up in the MSW stream unless the site separates them first.
Sources
- Containers and Packaging: Product-Specific Data (wood packaging, 1960–2018) U.S. EPA. Accessed October 27, 2026. Page last updated October 19, 2026; latest data year 2018.
- Wooden Pallets N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. Accessed October 27, 2026.
- Investigation of Disposal and Recovery of Wood and Wood Packaging in the United States (M.S. thesis) Virginia Tech (Z. P. Shiner, 2018). Accessed October 27, 2026. Published in peer-reviewed form as Shiner, Horvath, Araman and Gething, BioResources 16(1): 1496–1522 (2021).