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Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

cabinetmagazine.org

61–70 of 73 posts

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#61
post #25

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

I dunno, I've seen those around a lot, but when I was working at a DIY store we'd just stack empty pallets behind the building, a guy would come pick them up every month and use them for firewood (and make a buck off of selling the nails for scrap. Supposedly).

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#62
One major downside of the wooden pallets is the ever-present risk of fire. I worked at a food/vegetable processing plant once, it'd get vegetables from the field, we'd pack them, chuck 'em in boxes and stack them on pallets. (vacation job, yay)

Next to the plant were huge stacks of wooden pallets. Years after I worked there, the whole plant burned down; a fire started in the pallet stack, and since they're awesome fire material they took the whole factory with them. Not sure if it was accidental or intentional though.

Bonfires and world record attempts for bonfires often involve large amounts of wooden pallets. Cheap, very open, stable/stackable, ideal fire material. There's a picture of the world bonfire record in Norway where they build a giant tower out of pallets.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#63

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.

Have you ever seen an injection moulding machine that can produce something the size of a pallet? Do you know how much energy it takes to run one and how much expertise to keep it running? How much it costs? How much energy is required to power the recycling process? http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/1830977371/plastic_pallet_i... These machines are viable because they run continuously (at least, when they're not brok…

You wouldn't use injection molding for a pallet - it's too big. However compression molding is an option. It's not as accurate as injection molding, but it's significantly cheaper. Or at least it is at the scale my father-in-law works at when he makes plastic pallets :). His pallets are custom designed for a specific industry to fit in their manufacturing and logistics workflow.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#64

One major downside of the wooden pallets is the ever-present risk of fire. I worked at a food/vegetable processing plant once, it'd get vegetables from the field, we'd pack them, chuck 'em in boxes and stack them on pallets. (vacation job, yay) Next to the plant were huge stacks of wooden pallets. Years after I worked there, the whole plant burned down; a fire started in the pallet stack, and since they're awesome fi…

Isn't fire also a danger with plastic pallets? Generally, plastic fire is even worse than wood fire (in terms of heat and toxic substances generated). Wood burns, but it isn't instantly flammable and may in some circumstances withstand fire better than steel (though this is counter-intuitive).

You can add chemicals to plastic to make it resist fire, but those have other problems, often with toxicity.

Generally, if you have huge stacks of some unused material in a place, and it can catch fire, there is something wrong with the process. It would make sense that those pallets are worth some money so you can get rid of them easily. If not, should the local authorities control the amount of material stored if it can be a hazard?

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#65

One of the theories on how the Asian Long Horn Beetle (an invasive insect that is also a wood boring bug) came to the US was in wood used in shipping. Either palettes (skids is the term I've heard), or wood bracing in shipping containers. Plastic doesn't seem so bad.

As a software engineer, I have only once in my lifetime delivered something for which I had a certificate that it was bug-free.

This was when the company was moving some work to be done in India. We shipped a lot of used servers there, and they were on wood pallets. Prior to shipping, the Indian customs required a paper called phytosanitary certificate for the pallets. It meant the pallets had no bugs.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#66
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever seen an injection moulding machine that can produce something the size of a pallet? Do you know how much energy it takes to run one and how much expertise to keep it running? How much it costs? How much energy is required to power the recycling process? http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/1830977371/plastic_pallet_i... These machines are viable because they run continuously (at least, when they're not brok…

You wouldn't use injection molding for a pallet - it's too big. However compression molding is an option. It's not as accurate as injection molding, but it's significantly cheaper. Or at least it is at the scale my father-in-law works at when he makes plastic pallets :). His pallets are custom designed for a specific industry to fit in their manufacturing and logistics workflow.

I thought about this from reading about some of the materials the architect Shigeru Ban works with. He has skinned buildings with board made from hot rolling a mix of plastic and paper from packaging waste.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much does a pallet cost to manufacture and how much does a lo-jack cost to implant? Further, how much does it cost to keep the lo-jack running for a decade? 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-Li…

Just thinking out loud here--what about just using RFID for most of the pallets, and then putting powered electronics w/GPS only in some fraction of them? Say, 1 out of 20 or 50 (or whatever) pallets would have a battery, GPS, and an RFID reader; then those could read the RFIDS on any nearby RFID-equipped pallets. And transmit their location and the nearby RFIDs back to home base.

That's an interesting idea,and while RFID can be read up to nice distances(16 meter) but the RFID is quite power hungry and is dependent on antenna quality to achieve that , so it becomes a very challenging task and maybe an impossible one to build a decent concentrator.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#68

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…

The lack of palletization on Target's trucks seems inefficient at the store level, but may be justifiable at the company level, since Target owns its own distribution centers:

* Trailers are 9-10 feet high, so a fully palletized truck would (a) Have very tall unwieldy pallets, and you'd have to carefully order things so boxes on the bottom don't get crushed, (b) need racks or something similar to hold multiple tiers of normal-height pallets, or (c) be half-empty

* Even with the current process, getting boxes off the truck is not even close to the bottleneck. When I worked at Target, 2 people threw boxes onto rollers, 5-6 people sorted the boxes onto pallets organized by area of the store as they went by, 2 people rolled those pallets onto the sales floor and threw each box in front of the appropriate aisle, and ~20 people opened the boxes and stocked the shelves. The 2 people unloading the truck could always keep well ahead of the 20 on the sales floor.

* An alternate strategy might be to sort the boxes into pallets by store area at the distribution center rather than at the store. You might get some economies of scale out of doing this process for 100 stores at 1 distribution center, but it may still not be worth it to put all that needed floor space, latency, and congestion in what I imagine is already a very congested point in the supply chain. Better to distribute that part to the endpoints, since you already have 100k square feet per store to work with that's just sitting there while the store's closed.

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#69
post #2

A really compelling read. How many hidden industries like the pallets one are out there, waiting for software (or hardware) aid or disruption? I mean, 3.5 billion in pallet-related revenues :) , and millions in losses due to lack of tracking... is RFID really the best solution?

If you're interested in this kind of behind-an-industry reading I can highly recommend The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. http://alaindebotton.com/work/

Re: Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets

#70
post #47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1) There are plenty of standards in the pallet industry, especially in the EU. ( http://www.palettes-cp.com/welcome-en.html ) The US has the 48x40 GMA which for many years was used almost exclusive in the grocery chain. These standards were born of similar or exactly the same needs from different customers. Things like 2x2 barrels, poly supersacks, square and octagonal boxes, etc. All those things are standardized an…

> Source: I make pallets, lots of them.

Thanks for weighing in!

>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?

This surprises me. I certainly understand the fact that each product class will have different needs, but since transport is containerized I am astonished that the world hasn't converged on a pallet that maximizes container footprint, with the special cases being rare. I.e. people would adapt the number of units per pallet in order to optimize for the rest of the supply chain (warehouse footprint, ubiquity of available availability of etc etc). Clearly this is what Walmart et al are trying for.

But instead, to use a software analogy, abstraction is frozen at the container level but below that everything is largely bespoke. I don't know if there is some path dependency for this or if it's simply that the other parts of the supply chain are still highly fragmented and/or specialized.

Thanks again for your comment!

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