Gaylords in South Philadelphia and the Navy Yard

Three different economies share this corner. The Navy Yard is a campus of research labs, offices and light industry that grew out of a shipyard. Essington Avenue, in Southwest Philadelphia, is the wholesale produce market, a refrigerated block that handles fresh fruit and vegetables for the region. And between them is the redevelopment of the old refinery land, where very large warehouses are rising on soil that once held tanks.

Each makes a different kind of empty. Lab and clean-room tenants at the Navy Yard discard clean single-trip boxes. The market sees produce cartons and bulk bins in a steady flow. The new logistics buildings will deliver the biggest volume of all, mostly after tenants move in.

The Navy Yard is a 1,200-acre campus with more than 150 companies and about 16,000 full-time employees, with about 8 million square feet occupied or in development. Hilco Redevelopment Partners bought the 1,300-acre former refinery site in 2020 and began building the Bellwether District, about 14 million square feet of logistics, manufacturing and research space, in 2023.

Philadelphia's combined sewer system serves about 60 percent of the city, which matters here because wet cardboard and a flooded dock are not strangers on low ground. Keep your stack off the floor.

This page covers 19112, 19145, 19148 and 19153. The industries to expect there, from our market research: life sciences, logistics, port terminals and shipbuilding.

Produce at the market turns over every day. The Navy Yard and the new buildings follow business calendars; expect empties after a move-in, a re-fit or a product launch.

• Buy. A tenant with a one-time need for bulk boxes, or a produce handler wanting multi-trip bins.
• Sell. A building clearing pallets of single-trip empties after a move-in.
• Recycle. Torn or wet cartons and boxes from a market stall or dock.

Say whether the boxes are on the floor or on a dock, and whether the dock takes a truck. That decides pickup.

• Brownfield. Land that once held industry and needs cleanup before reuse, as at the former South Philadelphia refinery site now being rebuilt.
• Reefer. A refrigerated trailer or container; produce for the Essington Avenue market arrives in reefers and leaves its boxes behind.
• Clean-out. The emptying of a space at the end of a lease or project, which yields pallets of unused packaging.

• The street or the building, so we can tell the produce market from the Navy Yard.
• The kind of dock: a loading bay, a street door or a yard.
• The count and grade.
• The day you need the boxes gone or delivered.