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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."
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.
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"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
Think of the dock works who lost their jobs due to this "marvelous" invention. It's this efficiency and automation we have to fight against or nobody will have a job again. /sarcasm
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People understood the usefulness of the concept when the first pallets were built nearly a century ago, but a pallet isn't helpful without lift trucks, cranes, etc. That's why adoption started slow and accelerated over time.
there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios
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.
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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.
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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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Even without a proper forklift, a simple manual hydraulic pallet jack will leave you much better off than an unpalletized load for all but the heaviest pallets.
This comment was on a pallet.
But the longshoremen were on break. Union rules, sorry.
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>If you broke the pallets down and remove the nails...
You're doing it wrong - break the pallets down by breaking them - a maul or sledgehammer will usually do the job nicely. Then burn them and drag a magnet through the ashes to collect the nails. Why go through all the effort of removing the nails when you're about to remove the wood?
Of course given the number or lazy, irresponsible assholes in the world who would just leave the nails to wreak havoc on the next people to use the area I can't say I'd be surprised if the law required pre-extraction.
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While the parent may be off a bit, the quoted article times are ridiculous unless you are counting "man hours" including transport to/from the railcar and stacking on a shelf. It is absurb to think that a single boxcar would be staged on a busy warehouse spur for 3 days of loading or that a modern palletised boxcar takes 3-4 hours to unload with a forklift/pallet jack (it takes about 30min or so).
Long ago I worked a Target dock unloading trucks by hand. Depending on the store volume and the season, that would mean unloading between 3000 and 10,000 cases from 53' trailers each night, 5 to 6 nights a week. Unlike Walmart and some other stores, Target merchandise all came stacked in the truck except for a few bulk items (kitty litter/etc.), it is individually bulk-broke from the warehouse to restock each item depending on the previous days sales. (A large case count on an incoming truck always made us groan as it probably meant lots of deodorant/hair products which come in small 6 count cases.)
A typical 6000 case trailer, including setup and teardown time, would take approximately 2 hours to unload. 2 people in the trailer placing boxes on a conveyor, 4 to 6 people pulling/sorting boxes off the conveyor and on to pallets for storarge or delivery to the floor. If you extrapolate that to a 13,000 piece count you get roughly 24 man-hours, or "3 days" assuming a single 8-hour shift.
Likewise, I also worked a different warehouse job forklift loading 53' trailers. If all of your stock is pre-staged on the dock it takes about 15min to load a trailer. If you are pulling every pallet from the racks and transporting it to the trailer individually it will take 1 to 1-1/2 hours plus. Again, extrapolating that to an 85' boxcar you get roughly 3-4 hours.
So.... the only way you get the articles quoted loading/unloading times is you are counting man-hours including transport/, not literal time as is implied.
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.
They were defending their own country, rather than on the other side of an ocean.
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.
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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.