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 Station These 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

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.