Tag: pallets

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Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Update from The Fall SPC Members Meeting: CHEP Pallet Tour

I had a chance to tour the CHEP pooled pallet maintenance center during the Sustainable Packaging Coalition’s Fall Member Meeting in Florida.

 This was a fascinating look into the world of asset repair that ensures optimal performance and longevity of the wood pallets. This particular facility was operated by CHEP, an SPC member company that manages thousands of sturdy wood pallets in a pooled environment where the pallets are owned and maintained by CHEP. The pallets are treated as assets, and intense effort and scrutiny is afforded on maximizing the life of each pallet.

The process starts with pallets coming to the center for repair and being loaded on to a conveyor that moves them one by one past an inspection station manned by a human who visually surveys each pallet from multiple angles.

CHEP Pallet Inspection Station
Here the inspector will manually pull off damaged parts. Irreparable pallets are removed from the stream and manually hurled off the line. From here the pallet moves to one of several repair stations where the pallet is transferred onto the station.

CHEP Pallet Repair StationThese stations are equipped with a standard toolkit that includes a claw hammer, a specialized long-handled crowbar to rip off boards easily, a reciprocating saw with a metal cutting blade, and a heavy duty nail gun suspended on a spring. (My own pallet deconstruction tool kit used to study pallet construction while I was building the tertiary packaging LCA model for COMPASS 3.0 (Comparative Packaging Assessment) lacked the hefty nail gun.
What struck us most was the fact that though the pallets weighed nearly 65 pounds each and all the conveyance was mechanised, all inspection, dismantling, repair and movement on to the conveyors was essentially a manual process involving men moving adeptly at almost robot-like precision. This was an environment of intense concentration and manual dexterity (See the short video of a repair station in action). Pallets that had been repaired were placed back on the conveyor and moved through a series of rollers that push the nails down to flatten the surface. From there, the pallets are sent to a painting station where a fresh coat of the CHEP blue is applied before the lot is loaded onto flatbeds for delivery.
CHEP Repaired Pallets
All in all, this tour was a hit with the attendees, especially since this is an industrial process rarely seen. It helped confirm aspects of pallet construction and maintenance that I had come to appreciate through my own deconstruction and upcycling activities that let to the eventual LCA model in COMPASS.
Interested in learning more about packaging LCA? Connect with me on Twitter at @amistryman

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Eliminate Toxicity Recover More Sustainability Tools Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Part 3: A Wood Pallet's Artful Journey

In this part three of a four part series, I’d like to explore the creative side of the life cycle of some pallets. There is a growing urban hobbyists movement that uses the pallet to make basic yet creative products; check out 35 Creative Ways To Recycle Wooden Pallets for examples. Approaching the problem from a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) perspective, however, I became intrigued by the relatively low public profile tertiary packages (sometimes called transport packaging) play in comparison to the flashier on-the-shelf primary packages. Secondary and tertiary packages understandably play the supporting role to the charismatic primary packages that are designed to get our attention. Yet without the supporting cast, the lead role would scarcely be very effective.

As the product owner of GreenBlue’s COMPASS® (comparative packaging assessment), an LCA tool tailored for packaging design evaluation and improvement, I was interested in developing a comprehensive model that applies LCA to quantify the environmental burdens associated with the entire packaging system needed to deliver a product to the store shelf, including all the intermediate steps. Along with the requisite research, software development, data modeling, and validation steps, I also embarked on a journey to learn about the materials that made up the ubiquitous wood pallet. I was interested in the potential of the materials—not mere reuse or recycle, but potentially up-cycling into truly long lived products. There is a lot of hardwood used in pallets made in the U.S. South East and I wanted to explore the potential of the material with its built-in limitations. I had just completed construction of my own Three Beagle Workshop, and this challenge was perfect for my interest in multimedia art made with materials from found objects. And, I found pallets almost everywhere!

The first task was to tear down a few pallets and see what made them work. It seemed simple enough a task, but it proved be more difficult than expected. You see, pallets, even the expendable types, are very well constructed and able to withstand a great deal of force. Muscle power wasn’t enough to produce usable pieces of lumber so I employed power tools and decided to cut the nails instead of pulling them out to separate the various parts. This worked well and I soon had a decent pile of wood parts of fairly uniform, though worn, looking lumber. The next, more creative part of the job was to envision the potential locked within the limited configuration of the boards and planks.  I was intent on producing a product that did not resemble a pallet as the example in the above link, and still retained the distinct characters of wood that had lived a completely different life. This meant working with the dents, the knots, and most of all lumber with nails in them!

The first couple of products still had remnants of the pallet. Here is one 48″x48″ 2-way entry stringer type pallet reconfigured into a potting table:

   

pallet potting table

 And a sturdy European block pallet (EPAL) that had some mass to it. It became the base for a small wood shed to complement the backyard fire pit. Both of these items were functional and long-lived, yet they reveal the pallet origins, so back to the drawing board. Both pallets were destined to be hauled away in the municipal solid waste (MSW) and disposed at the landfill or at best turned into mulch.
   
 
Any woodworker knows the havoc nails in wood can cause on hand and power tools alike. But, I was determined, and with a bit of planning and patience, success! Here is the result of patience and working with the limitation imposed by the materials at hand. In the end, the success was more rewarding because the final product proudly exhibited the scars borne of the past life of the lumber. And, from an aesthetic perspective, the piece below reveals the grace that comes from passage of time and weathering. See for yourself:



dining table made from pallets   pallet dining table
Of course, there was a pile of spare parts that couldn’t be thrown away. When the opportunity to design a display for a collection of native bird painting arose, they were just perfect. With a bit of imagination those bits and pieces from several pallets were reborn as a gallery display for Virginia bird paintings.
Creative Things to Do With Pallets Photo Display     creative reuse photo tree display made from pallets
This creative process of tearing down wooden pallets paralleled the LCA model development process for COMPASS, and invariably influenced the nuances therein. In the next and final article, we will examine the depth of the tertiary packaging model in COMPASS.
Until then, if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on Twitter at @amistryman or comment below.

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Recover More Sustainability Tools Sustainable Packaging Coalition

Part 2: Secondary and Tertiary Packaging in Municipal Solid Waste

Tertiary Packaging And Compass Continued…

Let’s start part two of our four-part series with some basic facts about packaging in Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). In 2011, the overall recovery of packaging material was at approximately 51% with corrugated board and steel leading the charge in terms of highest material recovery. The overall rate is deceiving because the highly recovered materials such as steel and corrugated board skew the average as seen in the graphs below (2013, US EPA 2011 Facts and Figures Fact Sheet) and in this great infographic from the U.S. EPA.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In this post, I’d like to focus on the types of packaging that work in the background to bring the huge assortment of products we buy (fresh and packaged food, cosmetics, detergent, medicine, car parts, clothing, shoes, sporting goods, etc. ) to the shops we frequent. These packages have no fancy font, color, imagery or shape to catch your eye. In fact, many of them are plain brown corrugated boxes that make up the bulk of secondary packages and are recovered at a rate of about 91%. This recovered fiber is reused to make many types of paper products including new corrugated boxes. On the tertiary packaging front, wood plays a prominent role in the form of pallets and crates. Pallets are the workhorses of industrial packaging and come in a large variety of configurations to accommodate the various industrial specifications.
Companies such as CHEP manage many wood pallet configurations as a pooled resource with relatively long life span. These pallets are used and repaired many times to maximize the investment in material, cost, and design. Pallets also come in expendable variety that are typically used only once or a few times and then discarded. It is the expendable variety that we see in the back of grocery stores or the big box stores. These pallets sometimes find their way into the MSW and are included in the data above as “wood.”
Every year, 1.9 billion wooden pallets are in circulation in the United States, transporting a variety of goods.[1] Depending on the way the pallets are manufactured and managed, their life span and possibly their fate at end of useful life varies. Managed or pooled pallets are repaired multiple times to extend the life of the asset. They are sturdier to begin with to accommodate a relatively longer life. They may be broken down into parts to be reused to repair other pallets in the pool. On the other hand, expendable pallets may not be as sturdy as reusable types. The material investment is not managed as an asset and hence has a higher probability of disposal via landfill or incineration.
So, where do all the pallets go? 

  • Recycle – Wood from pallets is often mulched and used as landscape material. Some pallets are creatively recycled into useful household craft. See next article for examples from the Three Beagle Workshop.
  • Reuse – pallets are collected, repaired, and sold in a secondary market.
  • Incinerate – some fraction of wood pallets end up at waste to energy (WtE) facilities where the materials are incinerated and the resultant energy is used for heat or electricity generation
  • Dispose – to landfill

In the next installment, we will look at pallets in a more creative light and see what happens to some of pallets in circulation.

[1] 2013, IFCO. http://palletsbyifco.com/recycling/, accessed 19 August 2013.