WHAT ARE PALLETS AND WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BENEFITS THEY OFFER IN PRODUCT TRANSPORTATION?

Each warehouse has its own features, with wooden pallets as one of its structural components. Generally speaking, pallets are used for storing and moving products around the warehouse, and they are also the principal packaging material used in a warehouse. Having in mind the special conditions inside a warehouse and the exposure of goods to external effects, particularly the danger of being damaged by other goods, wooden pallets also provide protection for goods stored in warehouses. When goods are transported or moved from one location inside a warehouse to another, or from a transportation vehicle to the warehouse where they are stored, wooden pallets help absorb the shock, primarily due to their elasticity. Let’s not forget to mention the obvious advantages of wooden pallets compared to plastic ones, which account for as little as 5% of the total number of pallets currently used worldwide.

HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

Wooden pallets are a relatively new product, since they began to be used for storage purposes as late as the 20th century, leading to easier storage and handling in logistics. Their introduction into the storage industry resulted in numerous changes, in particular the modernization of logistics systems. Before wooden pallets were used, stacking goods was no easy feat since stacks of items would often come crashing down, and the scattered goods would attract various pests into the warehouse. The transition to pallets led to the use of machinery which enabled a quicker and more methodical system of packaging and storing goods, thus making shipping and transport of goods to customers and other warehouses more efficient.

With the introduction of wooden pallets into logistics, companies standardized the type of pallets used for warehouses and for transport, defined the number of entry points for forklifts where the fork is inserted to move the load from one location to another, and determined the exact dimensions of the pallets, so they would fit the dimensions of transport vehicles such as trailers and containers. When it comes to mobility of wooden pallets, there are pallets with two and four entry points, which means that the fork of the forklift can be inserted from either two or four sides, thus increasing mobility.

WHAT MATERIALS ARE USED IN PALLET MANUFACTURING?

Four types of materials are currently used in pallet manufacturing, namely wood, plastic, alloys, and cardboard. However, wooden pallets account for 90-95% of the market and remain in high demand in logistics for numerous reasons. They are easily recycled, quickly repaired, and environmentally friendly, to name a few. Their only disadvantage compared to other types of pallets is that wooden pallets are difficult to clean.

ADVANTAGES COMPARED TO OTHER TYPES OF MATERIALS

There are multiple advantages of wooden pallets compared to plastic ones, which are the second most frequently used pallets. Firstly, their price is significantly lower and they are more durable because they can be repaired, unlike plastic ones which are easily deformed if overloaded and whose brittleness increases over time. Furthermore, plastic pallets may contract when exposed to external impacts. Once deformed, plastic pallets cannot be repaired, and the materials they are made of are often unfit for recycling.

Metal pallets, used in the metal industry, are the least commonly used type of pallets. Most often they are made of aluminum or steel, which allows for easy cleaning, usually by washing. However, their weight affects the price of the goods transported on them, because they add to the overall weight of the transportation vehicle.

In addition to the above types, logistics also uses cardboard pallets for transporting light goods. In most cases, these pallets are reusable and easily recycled. However, the fact that they quickly become deformed shows that they were not made to last.

ADVANTAGES OF PALLETIZING

The use of wooden pallets helps create competitive advantage. Quick delivery and up-to-standard storage of goods cannot be achieved by manually storing goods in a warehouse. Moreover, goods which are not kept on pallets very often take up a lot of space in warehouses. Lastly, warehouses which do not use pallet systems encounter issues when it comes to organizing goods. Therefore, the use of pallets helps to improve logistics..

Let’s list some of the advantages of using pallets: :

Higher speed and quality of shipping and delivering goods, with shorter loading and unloading times. Standardizing pallets makes loading goods onto trucks, whose trailers and cargo space were also manufactured according to a certain standard, much easier to organize.
Palletizing goods has led to the introduction of machinery into transport processes linked to loading and unloading, thus reducing the need for workforce.
Temperature-sensitive products are better preserved – perishable goods kept in warehouses with no temperature control have less chance of getting spoiled when stored on pallets.
Less chance of damage — pallets serve as protective equipment, keeping goods safe. They cannot fall or topple over, once they have been properly stacked during storage and transport.
Workers are safer – less handling reduces the risk of injury.
More effective planning on how to stack pallets before shipment or even during transport because virtually all pallets come in predefined and specified sizes.