How we measure what a pallet costs the planet — and what recovery prevents.

Planet Price is a monetised life-cycle assessment. Every environmental impact — greenhouse gases, water use, land use, eutrophication, particulate matter, and six others — is converted into a dollar figure based on its societal cost.

The result is a single, comparable number: how much value an activity creates, or destroys, across the environment. A negative Planet Price means the activity avoids more harm than it causes. A positive Planet Price means it does net damage.

Because every category lands in dollars, you can compare CO₂ to water to land use directly — and you can roll the whole pallet program up to a single account-level figure for ESG reporting.

Each pathway is modelled across ten standardised LCA impact categories:

The reference unit for the entire model is one Australian Standard Pallet — 1165mm × 1165mm, approximately 25 kg of timber. Every per-pallet figure on this site refers to that unit unless otherwise stated.

Heavy Duty pallets (33 kg, used by clients like Sandvik) consume more material and have different transport profiles. They require a custom Planet Price analysis and are not interchangeable with the standard figures.

Landfill is the implicit baseline for the Planet Price methodology — every other pathway's figure represents the harm it prevents relative to landfill. The landfill figure shown on the hierarchy is the inverse: the cost imposed by choosing landfill over the best available pathway (re-use). Pathways between the two prevent proportionally less cost.

In the Planet Price column of any data table, recovery pathways carry a negative sign (avoided harm) and landfill sits at the zero line. In presentation views across the rest of the site, the verb carries the polarity — "prevented", "cost the planet", "credit" — and only the magnitude is shown.

The Planet Price methodology and the analysis behind every figure on this site are the work of Planet Price. Palleton commissioned the analysis but did not influence the methodology, the impact factors, or the underlying model. Palleton provides the operational data — pallet volumes, processing routes, transport distances, energy consumption — and Planet Price runs the model.

Making the invisible, visible.

The model is strongest where the data is best: timber sourcing, processing energy, transport. It is conservative where data is sparse: long-term biochar stability, soil amendment displacement rates, and downstream re-use of ground material.

The End-of-Life credit ($4.75) is uniform across all modelled pathways. The Use phase for "Recover & Re-use" pathways assumes no degradation in service life relative to a new pallet — this is consistent with field data but is a modelling assumption.

Two additional pathways — intact material reused in a new pallet build, and crushed timber combined with putrescible waste as a soil substitute — are in active development. They will be added to the hierarchy as the models are completed.