Reusable packaging and pallet CAGR tells us something useful about market growth. With reusable formats, however, sales may be only part of the story.
Almost 30 years ago, I wrote a column for CWPCA speculating about what the growth of more durable pallets might mean for pallet companies. Durable plastic pallets, CPC pallets, and CHEP pallets were all growing rapidly in uptake, and formed the basis of the discussion. My thinking was pretty simple. If pallets lasted longer, perhaps fewer new pallets would eventually be required. I suggested that pallet companies might want to look increasingly toward repair, retrieval, pooling, and other related services to help fuel future growth. It is a thought that has been repeated many times over the ensuing decades by myself and others.
As it turned out, new pallet sales kept growing. So did services. My prediction, at least in the neat way I had framed it, didn’t really happen. What else is new? The pallet market itself continued to expand; more goods moved on pallets, pooling grew, new applications emerged, and plenty of pallets still wore out, were damaged, went missing, or otherwise had to be replaced.
Still, I wonder if the original question was not so much wrong as incomplete. Reusable packaging has grown considerably since then, and we now have better tools for tracking assets and managing pools. That makes me wonder whether we sometimes put too much weight on one familiar number when we talk about market growth: CAGR.
A current Grand View Research report, for example, estimates the global reusable packaging market at $135.8 billion in 2024 and projects it to reach $190.1 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% from 2025 through 2030. The same report puts North American growth at 5.6%. Those numbers are useful, but the report is measuring revenue. That is an important distinction.
Revenue can rise because more pallets, totes, or containers are being sold, because the average selling price has increased, because customers are moving toward higher-value products, or through some combination of those factors. A 6% revenue CAGR, in other words, does not necessarily mean that 6% more reusable packaging units are entering service every year.
Even unit growth, however, may not tell us quite what we think it does when the product is reusable. The wrinkle is that a durable asset sold this year may continue competing for loads for years to come.
A million trips
Consider a deliberately simplified example. Suppose one pallet lasts for ten trips and another lasts for 100. I am not suggesting that these are representative averages for wood and plastic pallets. Actual pallet life varies enormously with design, load, handling, repair practices, loss rates, and the supply chain involved. The numbers simply make the arithmetic easy to see.
If a supply chain generates one million pallet trips, it would eventually consume the useful life of about 100,000 of our ten-trip pallets. Those same million trips would consume the useful life of only about 10,000 of the 100-trip pallets. The amount of freight has not changed. What has changed is the number of new pallets needed to provide the service.
Now suppose annual unit sales of the longer-lived pallet are growing by 6%. Those new pallets do not enter an empty market. They join pallets sold last year, and the year before, and perhaps several years before that, that are still circulating. Depending on retirement and loss rates, the installed population might therefore grow differently from annual sales, and its share of actual pallet trips might grow differently again.
That seems to me to be the important distinction. Market growth can mean at least three different things: more dollars of reusable packaging sold, more new units entering service, or more freight movements being handled by reusable assets. Those measures may move in the same direction, but I am not sure we should assume they will move at the same rate.
Then there is the leak
Of course, our tidy 100-trip example has an obvious problem. The pallet has to survive long enough, and stay in the system long enough, to make those 100 trips.
Reusable packaging programs can be leaky. Assets get stranded, appropriated for other uses, damaged, discarded, mixed into somebody else’s pool, or simply disappear. The percentages vary enormously by application and ownership model, so I would be wary of treating any single loss rate as an industry norm.
That said, the numbers being cited by technology providers are striking. Wiliot currently says distribution operations lose 10–15% of reusable transport items annually to shrink, misplacement and network imbalance. A 2026 SupplyChainBrain article, drawing on work from Lyngsoe Systems and Beontag, also cites RTI losses of 10–15%. I would treat those figures as indicators of the scale of the problem rather than a definitive North American benchmark, but they are consistent with something reusable packaging people have been talking about for decades.
This raises another possibility. We tend to think of market penetration as being driven primarily by how many new reusable assets are sold. We know this intuitively anyway, but what if the supply chain simply gets better at keeping the assets it already has?
Suppose, just for illustration, that a reusable pallet pool historically loses 10% of its assets each year and improved visibility, accountability and recovery reduce that loss to 5%. Nothing about the physical pallet has changed. New-unit sales could remain exactly where they were. Yet more pallets would survive into the following year and remain available to make additional trips.
If the market for palletized freight is growing at the same time, and new reusable pallets are still being added, the effects could compound. New assets enter the pool while fewer existing ones leak out. It seems reasonable that the reusable format’s installed base, and possibly its share of actual pallet movements, could then grow faster than new-unit sales alone would suggest.
I say possibly because the arithmetic is not quite that tidy in the real world. Assets can sit idle. Cycle times vary. Some pools are balanced and others are not. A pallet that survives for ten years but turns only twice a year may contribute less packaging service than a shorter-lived pallet that turns every few weeks. Better retention helps, but retention and utilization are not the same thing.
Maybe turns are the more interesting number
That leads me to wonder whether, for reusable packaging, the metric we should be more interested in is not simply units sold but turns delivered. A durable container that repeatedly completes its loop is doing something that a sales statistic cannot really capture after the first year it enters service.
This is where tracking becomes much more than a loss-prevention story. RFID, Bluetooth, cellular and other technologies may help operators recover assets, but they can also reveal dwell, imbalance and under-utilization. If a company can make the same pool turn more quickly, or can avoid buying excess assets because it finally knows where they are, the economic value of the reusable system increases without a corresponding increase in container sales.
There is a curious balancing act in that for reusable packaging manufacturers. If the product becomes more durable and customers become better at keeping it in circulation, replacement demand might eventually soften. That would be good news for reuse and potentially good news for customers, but perhaps less exciting if your business model depends overwhelmingly on selling another physical unit.
Which brings me back to that old CWPCA column. I was clearly premature in thinking that durable pallets might suppress new pallet sales. Market expansion was more than enough to keep new pallet demand growing. But perhaps the second part of the argument, the growing importance of services, deserves another look.
Repair may extend useful life. Tracking may reduce loss. Retrieval can bring assets back into circulation. Pooling and rental can turn the pallet or container into a service rather than a one-time sale. Data and network management might help customers get more trips from fewer assets. None of those activities necessarily replaces manufacturing, but they could become a larger part of where value is created as reusable systems mature.
Looking past CAGR
None of this makes CAGR a pointless number. It is simply a number that needs a label. Is the forecast measuring revenue or units? If it is revenue, how much might reflect price? If it is units, are we looking at replacements, new pool creation, or expansion of existing systems? And what is happening to the reusable assets already in circulation?
Perhaps we need to think about reusable packaging growth on several levels at once: annual revenue, annual unit sales, installed asset population and the share of actual packaging trips being performed by those assets. We probably will not get good data for all four, especially the last one, but recognizing the difference might keep us from reading too much into a headline CAGR.
The part I find most intriguing is what happens if reusable packaging becomes both more durable and less leaky. In that case, even fairly ordinary growth in new-unit sales might support a considerably larger increase in the installed reusable population over time. If those assets also turn more efficiently, their share of supply chain activity could increase faster still.
That might have implications not only for how we measure reusable packaging growth, but also for how companies make money from it. The future opportunity may continue to be in making better pallets, totes and containers. Increasingly, though, it may also be in helping customers keep them, find them, repair them and get another trip out of them.
Almost 30 years later, that is a somewhat different version of the argument I was trying to make the first time around. I am not prepared to predict exactly where it leads. My track record should probably discourage that anyway. But the next time I see a report forecasting 6% growth in reusable packaging, I will be wondering about something the CAGR does not tell me: how much faster might reuse itself be growing?
Selected sources
Grand View Research, “Reusable Packaging Market Size & Share Report, 2025–2030.”
Wiliot, “Reusable Asset Tracking.”
SupplyChainBrain, “Mastering Returnable Transport Items (RTIs) in Peak Seasons,” April 15, 2026.
Beontag, “Mastering RTIs in Peak Seasons,” June 29, 2026.
Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.