41–50 of 73 posts
http://www.smh.com.au/business/bunnings-11m-pallet-cleanser-...
They now refuse to allow any CHEP pallets on to any Bunnings site. LOSCAM, whitewood or nothing.
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An inferior version of Taco Bell, often found in Canadian food courts.
It's really strange to hear you describe one as inferior when they barely sell the same food. True, they both sell food based around Mexican staples of corn, beans, tomatoes, spices, and meat, but that's as far as the similarities go. Taco Bell has trouble proving that up to 35% of its beef comes from cows: http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/01/24/lawsuit-filed-in... Taco Time's ground beef isn't even frozen: http…
Actually, Taco Bell had no trouble at all proving that their beef met the standard, and the suit was dropped pretty quickly.
See: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/19/us-lawsuit-tacobel...
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Disclosure: I run one of the largest wooden pallet manufacturing companies in the United States. My family has been in this business for 50+ years. Your perspective on whitewood comes from a 3rd tier perspective (grocery, as you say). In other words your various suppliers buy their pallets from various sources and then ship their product into you on those pallets. You and your (former?) employer are not directly invo…
Aside from expense, what issues do plastic pallets have?
In order to combat the fire front manufacturers starting using chemical composition to make their pallets flame retardant. One of the those chemicals is called deca bromine and is considered to be extremely hazardous. This creates a problem specifically in scenarios where food contact is common.
This is a dated article, but it references some of the concerns.
http://www.palletenterprise.com/articledatabase/view.asp?art...
The article is stacking the deck pretty heavily: After all, collecting these stray pallets takes a lot of labor, a lot of miles, and a lot of trucks. vs they receive blue pallets whether they want them or not So the recyclers' hands are tied because they receive pallets mixed in with white pallets when delivered by the truckload, but then they get to turn around and talk of all the effort collecting them. It's not ha…
Correct me if I'm wrong but my impression from reading the article is that recyclers don't pay for those used pallets, they're just taking away what would otherwise be trash. So there's no incentive they can offer to eliminate the blue pallets from what they're receiving.
You could easily make a cheap machine that could make pallets to order out of plastic packaging scrap on-site. Judging from this article though, that might annoy a hell of a lot of people.
Note: I worked for a large grocery chain for 7 years Plastic pallets are vastly superior in the long run to wooden pallets in terms of durability, and many companies have used them for almost two decades interchangeably with wooden pallets. One of the issues here is that once a pallet enters the supply chain, who knows if or when you'll get them back. When I first started working for the grocery chain, there were ove…
I also worked in the grocery industry for most of a decade. My sister worked for local fast food and general retail chains (Taco Time & Target) and I was always amazed at the lack of palletization they used. Target especially. Target sends several trucks a day to each store. Each truck is half-full, and half of that freight is simply "stevedoered" into the truck, not put on pallets. So emptying a truck is a several-h…
Part of Target's madness might be in the extremely different kinds of merchandise they're selling, but most of those products are small, and Winn-Dixie solved the problem by sending these products in plastic totes.
There's also an interesting system in Europe called EUR-pallet. [0] They are usually made out of higher quality wood and quite durable. The system works by trading pallets for pallets, so if you receive some goods on a EUR pallet the driver takes an empty EUR pallet from your stack and it'll be reused at the other company. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR-pallet
EUR-pallet isn't the only alternative. I'm fascinated that after all these years there isn't a standard pallet size. I have tried to design products that can "ship on a pallet" and end up shooting for a footprint one meter on a side which fits within a lot of format but leaves plenty of wasted space: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet#Dimensions
2) Customization is a factor of efficiency. Why would someone shipping a product want to buy a standard size pallet that doesn't fit or hold the weight requirement for his use case? Instead, he consults with either internal packaging specialists (in big companies) or a manufacturer directly to design a pallet to fit his load. By doing this he actually knows the limitations of the packaging (stacked x high, racked, weight distribution, unstacker and rollerbed compatibility, etc) and also has some general idea that the product he is receiving is correctly priced for his requirements. Many times those requirements are customer driven, meaning my customer's customer.
Source: I make pallets, lots of them.
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What's taco time?
Interestingly, that's actually a rather unclear question. There are (at least) two fast food franchises that bear the name "Taco Time". The largest Taco Time is an international chain of restaurants, found in the US and Canada[0]. The smaller Taco Time , officially Taco Time Northwest is a franchise local to Washington State, largely the greater Seattle area, where I grew up[1]. Taco Time NW has generally higher qual…
That said, anyone craving Taco Bell while in the Portland/Vancouver area would still be well-advised to check out a local Taco Time instead -- it's still better quality food. Or at least it was 10-15 years ago.
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Aside from expense, what issues do plastic pallets have?
There's a massive PR engine at work for both the wooden and plastic side, but the things brought up most are fire and chemical composition. You would think that nothing could worse for a fire than wooden pallets (It's a constant concern for us, not so much pallets but just wood products in general) but there's a serious hazard with the manufacture of some plastic pallets. (Think oil fire.) I'm sure some of this has b…
I guess fire and contamination risk is much more immediate to the company bottom line, unless the material origin could be turned into a branding/marketing factor - "We only use goddamn all-American pallets!"
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Yeah $15 for the electronics. $20 to $100 for the battery depending on how good your hardware/software is. Probably a cast aluminum case, and then some way to get the antenna out. Plus the whole thing has to be rugged enough to survive the injection molding process which is no joke. Worse is that even if the ENTIRE lo-jack is built into a single monolithic chip (which will take millions to engineer) you still have to…
Aren't shipping containers steel all around? They do have wooden flooring though, but under that is steel from what I understand.