When I was in college, studying furniture design, there was a guest teacher who worked for a company called Bronx 2000 that had a spin-off company called Big City Forest. They had a contract with Con Edison to take about 3,500 pallets a week that they turned into flooring and furniture.
NYT article
and
a sad follow-up.
Some of the stuff they made was gorgeous. A lot of pallets are made of "exotic" tropical wood that either didn't make the grade for furniture lumber or was just re-directed to pallet making. Sort of like how our domestic woods like oak, maple, cherry can go to secondary uses because there is only so much of a market for fine woodworking hardwoods.
The teacher incorporated the idea of recycling into some of the design briefs; build a piece of furniture using only the wood from one pallet, or all the wood from a pallet, things like that, with no other limits. A lot of neat ideas came out of those assignments.