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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."
I did a PC refresh job with another guy at a local hospital where the IT department stored old equipment inside a chain-link cage inside a warehouse-style storage room. This was also where construction debris from other parts of the hospital were dumped here.The place was a disaster area -- and our new work area.
Since our first PC shipment wasn't expected for another three days, we spent that time cleaning up. Finding a pallet-sized box with low walls, we hauled out ten pallets of construction debris to the dumpster on the first day. We sorted and organized equipment to pallets on the second day. And, finally, we hauled everything out of the cage to sweep and mop the floor on the third day. Thereafter, people complained they couldn't find anything because we stacked everything on pallets. :/
We eventually deployed 750 PC's and 1,500 monitors. Every two weeks we got 10+ pallets of equipment that filled our work area. A week of unboxing, a week of deploying. This became the rhythm of the project. All the old equipment (minus the labeled hard drives that we kept in case we needed to pull data) got boxed up on pallets for the recycler. On the final day of the project, we left the cage clean and empty than it was before.
Later on I cleaned up an IT storage room filled with old equipment that no one have seen the floor in over eight years. That took six weeks of my spare time between tasks to clean up. Most of the old equipment ended up on pallets for the recycler. After I got the room completely empty, I had facility come in to mop and wax the floor.
Depending on where and how the wood in the pallets is processed, pallets can host invasive wood-boring insects. Locally we're having problems with the Asian longhorn beetle which is believed to have been introduced to Massachusetts via shipping pallets and crates. A lot of port cities and major shipping centers have seen outbreaks.
There are plastic and metal pallet systems that should be used if shipping long distances.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
And forklifts. The invention actually consists of two parts to be really successful - the second part being the forklift or pallet jack. Moving pallets by hand sucks.
Instead, everyone lined up, from the pier down to where we were stacking the cans.
Time was, surface vessels got their fuel the same way: all the enlisted plus the ensigns passing sacks of coal.
And you get usable lumber and nails to make stuff out of.
That's what my father did after he retired to a trailer park. One neighbor gave him old pallets to break down because the county dump charges a small fortune to dispose of them. He gave the usable wood and nails to a neighbor to build chicken coops and bird houses for sale. The unusable wood goes into a neighbor's wood chipper to make compost. The unusable nails are taken down to the recycling center. A win-win situation for everyone involved.
In the US Navy, they made a contest of it, too, starboard watch against port watch. If you made the ship list enough (because you filled the coal bunkers on your side so much faster), your side got extra leave.
The Truckie above is right about CHEP pallets. These blue pallets with white lettering are ubiquitous in Australia, and there are a number of yards at which you can pick them up and drop them off.
Because it's a rental thing and pallets aren't free to manufacture, there's a penalty if you don't bring them back. AND -- amazingly -- it is at least sometimes NOT on the people who picked them up, or loaded or unloaded them, but on the person who authorised the job with the contractor, who may not have ever even SEEN the pallets in question.
Why would this happen? Because anyone can rock up to a CHEP yard with a bunch of blue pallets and receive back, in cash, the deposit for said pallets. Going pallet-hunting is apparently not an uncommon activity among Australian tradesman after a big night of drinking when the next payday is still days away. Most of us would have no reason to know this, and presumably the economy somewhat relies on this, but basically an unguarded CHEP pallet is like a $100 note (or whatever the deposit is... as I recall, it isn't a small number) sitting on the ground.
So, a friend of mine, in charge of maintenance for a piece of public infrastructure, one day had some maintenance done. The supplies for this apparently came on CHEP pallets. He knows this not because he'd ever been TOLD about any CHEP pallets by the workers... but because one day CHEP sent him a bill for $4,000. He wrote back, don't know anything about your pallets, never seen 'em, don't have 'em, not paying this invoice. SOMEHOW this degenerated into a personal attack by CHEP on him, calling him at home, nagging him for these pallets he'd had nothing to do with. It went on for months. His management backed him on not paying the invoice, but that didn't help in the context of CHEP taking the dispute personal.
One day he got sick and tired of this, and called up the contractors in the middle of the night. "Round up your mates, and round up a big-ass truck. We're going for a drive." And they drove around all night, picking up any blue pallet that wasn't nailed down. Final count it was something like hundreds of them, if I recall correctly. They dropped them off at CHEP. He used the funds to pay the CHEP invoice and pocketed the rest and told the contractors they better not ever say another word about this.
Apparently in recent years, CHEP has begun to bar code pallets so they can track them, so I have no idea if they're still easy, untraceable currency as they were 5+ years ago.