Wooden pallets and their reusability factor

Translator

In an environmentally conscious world where none but the most extreme fringes of opinion continue to dispute the scientific and visible evidence of climate change, recycling is more widely embraced than ever. In the logistics industry, which uses very high quantities of packaging materials through necessity, the reduction of waste is a constant challenge. Traditional wooden pallets, non-standard pallets, strapping and plastic wrapping are all the subjects of experiments in repurposing.

The Global Picture

The biggest source of potential waste is the wooden pallet. It is reliably estimated that there are about 250 million timber pallets in circulation in the UK today. And while wood is a sustainable material, it is also currently a scarce commodity. Demand has grown but supply has not kept pace due to restrictions on tree felling, poor climatic conditions and the delay inherent in newly planted trees reaching maturity. Inevitably, scarcity leads to price rises but even if cost were not an issue it would still make sense to drastically reduce our reliance on newly manufactured pallets. There are 5 billion pallets in the world, 90% of them is wooden. It is high time that reuse became an imperative.

Fortunately in the UK, the number of pallets being repaired and reused continues to grow. In 2019, a report commissioned by the Timber Packaging & Pallet Confederation (TIMCON) and the Forestry Commission calculated that 48.3 million were repaired in one year, an increase of 5% on 2018. In the same year, the production of new pallets stayed at the 2018 level of around 44.9 million. The ratio is heading in the right direction but there is always more to do.

Pallets are indispensable for the transport of goods but they can quickly become burdensome. If you are a business that regularly takes delivery of palletised products but has little or no need to use the pallets yourself, you will rapidly accumulate stacks of both standard and non standard pallets which take up your storage space and sooner or later will have to be disposed of. Some firms are assiduous in taking back pallets after delivery, but many write off the cost of replacing them against the effort and organisation involved in recovering them. This is how millions of pallets end up homeless and unwanted.

If the onward journey of your goods requires pallets then the problem solves itself, but if not, you need an efficient means of getting them off your premises. Dispatching them as industrial waste to municipal recycling centres or landfill is unsatisfactory because they are either consigned to the soil or in the best case recycled into some other form or used as fuel. There is nothing wrong with this kind of recycling but if this is what happens to pallets after one or two uses then it is shortening their lifespan unnecessarily. When pallets have exhausted their usefulness to carry goods, it is perfectly reasonable to let them be repurposed, but long before that stage, they can continue to have a useful life in logistics.

It is estimated that the average wooden pallet can be used 9 times before its strength and reliability will start to fail. The rise of pallet pooling is an acknowledgement of this resilience. Instead of dumping unwanted pallets, it is far better to send them to a company that specialises in collecting, repairing, storing and leasing out pallets. This keeps them in the supply chain many times longer, reduces the need to manufacture new pallets and saves money.

Handling Non-Standard Pallets

The vast majority of pallets used across the world are 48x40. Many products, however, need to be transported on pallets of different designs for reasons of size, shape, weight or security and safety issues. Inevitably, these are harder for average businesses to reuse, which is when a pallet pooling service becomes even more convenient. While pooling companies themselves generally stick with the standard size for economic reasons, they are more likely to find a way to put non-standard pallets back into service than anyone else.

Once wooden pallets can no longer serve the industry and provided that the timber has not been treated or contaminated with toxic chemicals, they can be recycled as shelving, cabinets, garden furniture, planters and many other household items.