Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets
cabinetmagazine.org

> What is most vexing to many recyclers is the belief that the accumulation of blue pallets in their yards is not an accident, but a deliberate CHEP strategy. After all, collecting these stray pallets takes a lot of labor, a lot of miles, and a lot of trucks. If you are CHEP, why do this work yourself if you can get someone else to do it for you, at a price that you dictate?

> In 2008, a group of recyclers filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that CHEP was leveraging its dominant market position, and violating anti-trust law, by transferring its operational costs onto recyclers. The recyclers argued that CHEP had made them into a “conscripted collection army.”

I used to run a 10,000 sqft logistics facility (really tiny in that world) and we kept a stock of about 20 pallets. I seem to remember the wooden ones costing $2-$5 used and the plastic ones less than $50 new. The most expensive pallets I could find from U-Line are $100 or so. http://www.uline.com/BL_8204/Rackable-Pallets

Figure that adding an armored place to put a lo-jack would cost $5-$10 (gotta protect it) and that the actual lo-jack would cost at least $50. It would need to be metal encased with a way to sneak an antenna out, have a "lifetime" battery (lithium-thionyl-chloride, not cheap http://www.all-battery.com/lithiumprimarybatteries.aspx) and the whole thing would have to be molded in to the pallet lest someone get clever and remove them cheaply. The batteries MUST be an integral part of the lo-jack so that someone couldn't just remove the batteries and neuter the device.

Then the data plan to keep it connected up to the world via the internet would cost at least a buck or two every month (in HUGE bulk purchases, individually it's something like $10/mo/device). Worse is that if someone puts them inside a metal building or metal shipping container or metal truck they're going to have a hell of a time getting a GPS fix and/or communicating with the cellular network.

So now that you've done all this your $40 to $100 (max) pallet now costs at least $50 and perhaps even $100 more PLUS it costs you something monthly whether people are renting it or not. What do you get to charge for this? From when I can tell, about $5 per trip. http://www.palletforum.com/tm.asp?m=26458 That's on a nominal $20 pallet cost although they may cost more now, the forum post is 2 years old.

I can't see how building a lo-jack into a pallet is going to be a compelling value proposition given all the limitations.

A GPS car tracker costs a lot less than what you're quoting, when purchased in bulk from China (I don't know about reliability figures though :) ). I think it was in the U$ 15 range for the entire thing. Certainly not the armored thing you're describing, which sounds pretty expensive.

And the cell phone data plan could be negotiated way down (I think your estimate is correct, about U$ 1 or 2 per month). What I pay here as a consumer in Uruguay is less than U$ 5/month for 384 megabytes. Getting a fix is definitely a problem, but you can track it until it gets inside wherever it lost the signal (hopefully it's a warehouse).

That said, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to start putting GPS trackers on pallets :) (I still don't see them being ubiquitous with pets and other higher-value items to track).

If it wasn't feasible for cars (MUCH more expensive than pallets), then I agree with your estimate that it won't happen soon, but it's going to be possible sometime in the near future (and somebody is going to be ready for that, and make a killing).