Gaylord boxes in Philadelphia County

The county sits at the top of the tidal Delaware, and its freight shows it. Marine terminals at Tioga and along the South Philadelphia waterfront take in wood, steel, containers and palletized cargo, and the loads that come off those ships are packed in everything from cartons to bulk boxes. Behind the docks are warehouses, food processors and the city's wholesale produce trade, each of which touches corrugated in a different way.

Inside the city line you will not find melon fields or resin plants. What you find is the other end of the chain: buildings that receive goods in bulk boxes and have to do something with the empties. A distribution dock stacking single-trip gaylords by the dozen is common here, and so is the question of whether to sell them or send them to a baler.

The Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market on Essington Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia is a fully enclosed, refrigerated building of 686,000 square feet, completed in 2011, with 19 wholesale produce businesses. It diverts about 80 percent of its waste stream, mainly through anaerobic digestion. We name it as context, never as a customer.

Tioga Marine Terminal spans 116 acres with six berths. The Navy Yard is a 1,200-acre campus with more than 150 companies and about 16,000 full-time employees. The former South Philadelphia refinery site, 1,300 acres bought in 2020, is being built out as the Bellwether District with roughly 14 million square feet of logistics, manufacturing and research space.

This page covers 19112, 19145, 19148, 19153, 19134, 19137, 19124, 19135, 19136, 19114, 19115, 19116, 19154, 19120, 19140 and 19146. The three district pages below take the same ZIPs one neighborhood at a time. The industries to expect there, from our market research: port and marine terminals, logistics, life sciences, food processing and urban agriculture.

Produce moves all year through the city, with the busiest weeks following the growing calendar in South Jersey and the fruit ships in from South America. Retail peaks before the winter holidays fill the warehouses in the fall and empty them in January, which is when single-trip gaylords tend to pile up.

• Buy. Warehouses and processors in the city that need bulk boxes for a job or a season, usually used Grade A or B in the 48 x 40 footprint.
• Sell. A dock holding single-trip empties from inbound freight, or a trailer of flats from a closing project.
• Recycle. Damaged, wet or torn boxes from a produce handler or a terminal, ready for the baler.

Tell us the ZIP and what you hold or need. We reply by email, and we say plainly when a request falls outside what we do.

• Breakbulk. Cargo that is neither containerized nor loose bulk, lifted on and off ships piece by piece or by the pallet, which is why so much of it arrives in mixed packaging.
• Cold chain. The unbroken line of refrigerated storage and trucks that keeps fresh produce cool from the field to the shelf, and the reason the wholesale market is fully enclosed.
• Slip sheet. A thin sheet of fiberboard or plastic that replaces a pallet under a load, picked up by a push-pull forklift attachment instead of forks.

• The ZIP and the neighborhood, so we know which river ward or avenue you are on.
• Whether the boxes sit on a dock, in a yard or on the street side of a building.
• The count, the footprint and the grade as you see it.
• Whether a truck can back in, and whether there is a forklift.