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The Magic of Pallets
HughPickens.com writes Jacob Hodes writes in Cabinet Magazine that there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of. According to Hodes the magic of pallets is the magic of abstraction. "Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a "unit load"—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Although the technology was in place by the mid-1920s, pallets didn't see widespread adoption until World War II, when the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—"the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere," according to one historian—gave new urgency to the science of materials handling. "The pallet really made it possible for us to fight a war on two fronts the way that we did." It would have been impossible to supply military forces in both the European and Pacific theaters if logistics operations had been limited to manual labor and hand-loading cargo.
To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. "According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours." Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. "According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours." Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
"The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container (shipping container) and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box:_How_the_Shipping_Container_Made_the_World_Smaller_and_the_World_Economy_Bigger
there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios
I have hand loaded many of those standard sized shipping containers myself, with un-palleted materials, it takes two guys like 3-4 hours. And there is no reason that loading would be any faster than unloading.
You can unload 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods in four hours, the same amount of time it takes anyone else with pallets? That's pretty fucking amazing, I must say.
A boxcars-worth (86' - 13,000 cases) of anything won't fit into a standard shipping container (20') or even a double-length container (40').
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This is why there are now standards for what wood can be shipped internationally. All wood packaging entering the United States (Pallets, Cable spools, crates, etc...) is supposed to be fumigated and treated to avoid this. This is one of the things that import inspections actually do catch.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Don't forget plastic stretch wrap: until they get wrapped up tight many pallet load are too dangerous to move more than a few feet and impossible to move over the bumps of a dock plate. Rope, tape, cargo nets and other options can kinda work but the modern pallet freight system would slog down without cheap, disposable (and recyclable) plastic wrap. (Aside: I have been witness to what happens when a Walmart store runs out of pallet wrap. It is... awkward.)
Like many inventions, it's obvious with hind-sight. But palettes also required improvements elsewhere, such as factory floors that were reasonably level and solid, capable of supporting stacked palettes, and eventually racking.
Very true.
"Humans passing things hand over hand" is actually a pretty cool "invention", when you think about it. Amazingly adaptable.
We sure couldn't get pallets down the hatch of a submarine. Instead, everyone lined up, from the pier down to where we were stacking the cans.
Really?
Last I saw, they're moving to flatter, sturdier, permanent-use molded plastic pallets that have integrated RFID and compartments for things like GPS and batteries, that are meant to be used for many years. Sure, pallets take some vertical space, but the amount of space taken is small compared to the ability for one person to move close to two tons of cargo single-handedly across smooth floors with no more than a jack.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It takes time to build pallets. It takes time to break apart, resort, and rebuild pallets. It costs money to repair and replace the pallets themselves. Pallets require extra ceiling space to actually pick them up and put them into a truck or container, resulting in wasted volume in that truck or container. The logistics industry is quickly moving away from pallets for everything but long term storage.
Actual truck driver here. No they're not or at least in Europe they're not. You can load a pallet onto a truck with just a couple of inches clearance, enough for the skids on the pallet not to slide along the floor. What actually determines pallet height and therefore wasted space in a truck is the racking at the warehouses. Its the spacing between the shelving on the racking. Rented pallets is the model used the most with Chep being the largest player in the world. Most large companies won't accept goods unless they're on Chep pallets, that's how well they're built and how well designed the rental system is. You don't need to worry about the time it takes to build pallets or repair them because Chep take care of that. You merely send one of your trucks in to a Chep factory en-route back to load up 300 pallets or get Chep to deliver them and collect the damaged ones.
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Please stop commenting about something you don't know shit about, you're just embarrassing yourself.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
> It reminds me of that old joke about why the Space Shuttle (and now SLS) design is influenced by the width of a horses ass.
Two horse's asses. Wagons were sized according to the width of two horses, and roads were in turn sized to fit the wagons. When underground mining got serious, the mining wagons were just converted outdoor wagons, still pulled by two horses. Then they started putting rails under the wagons, to allow moving heavier loads with less friction. Rail lines began to be used outdoors, pulled by horses at first, so the rail spacing continued to be suitable to the width of two horses. One engines replaced horses, the rails stayed the same width. Go look at train tracks today, you will see they are the right size for two horses to fit.
The Solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle were shipped by rail from Utah to Florida, and thus had to fit on railcars on the standard rail spacing. In turn, the size of the boosters set the lift capacity of the rocket, and thus how big the Shuttle Orbiters could be. Finally, the Space Station modules had to fit in the Orbiter, so the Space Station's design is dictated by the width of two horse's asses.
I may have been responsible for this analysis about 30 years ago at Boeing. I was both designing launch vehicles, and had a hobby interest in the history of technology. It is also possible it came up in a USENET discussion on sci.space back then. I don't remember any more.