SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota— Mueller Pallets LLC has been supplying new and recycled wood pallets to America’s heartland since 1980, but the Sioux Falls, South Dakota firm recently added two key pieces of equipment to help expand its market. The company, which manufactures, reconditions and recycles pallets in standard 48×40 and custom sizes, was looking for ways to help its customers ship items overseas and better respond to an increase in requests for customized projects.
In the spring of 2012, Mueller Pallets added a Kiln-direct.com Piggy Back system, allowing it to heat treat and certify wooden pallets and crates for international shipping. A year ago, the company added a Wood-Mizer LT70 hydraulic sawmill to its outdoor drop-off site, allowing it to cut wood into a variety of custom products.
Chad Fodness, Mueller Pallets’ sales and marketing director, said the two purchases have helped the company reach new customers and better serve its existing customer base.
“It was to help spur on growth, trying to supply better than we did before,” Fodness said of the heat treat and sawmill systems.
Mueller Pallets is a second-generation, family-owned business begun in 1980 by Arlin Mueller. The company is now run by son Henry and daughter-in-law Margie, and it employs several dozen people in a pair of buildings at an industrial area on the far south end of South Dakota’s largest city.
The company describes itself as a zero waste operation – even used nails and staples removed from recycled pallets are recovered and recycled by the ton. Nearly all of its wood waste is transported to a nearby ethanol plant, where it’s fed into a solid waste fuel boiler to provide more than half of the biorefinery’s power needs.
Mueller Pallets processes about 20,000 pallets a week, including repairable pallets, new pallets, heat-treated pallets and old pallets that are fed into its Diamond Z DZH5000 grinder. About 40% of the company’s sales are new pallets, 20% are heat treated pallets and 40% are used/recycled pallets. A fleet of trucks and trailers dock into nine beds attached to the facility, ready to deliver pallets to customers up to hundreds of miles away.
The Kiln-direct Piggy Back system, which offers an inexpensive alternative to setting up a standalone heat treatment system, attaches to an insulated container that sits outside between Mueller Pallets’ two buildings.
Rebecca Mueller, Mueller Pallets’ office manager, said the company heard great things about Kiln-direct’s products and service, and the trailer’s location allows employees to load pallets right from the dock.
“Ours uses propane gas and the unit is more efficient than we anticipated,” Mueller said. “For loading and unloading it is the same as loading a regular trailer when the product is being shipped out when finished.”
“We put it in just for heat treating pallets so they can go overseas if they need to,” Fodness said. The trailer can hold 306 48×40 pallets, said plant manager Dan Ellis.
“You load it, and it has three sets of probes that we have to put at a certain height,” Ellis explained. “And those probes record the temperature.”
Once the internal temperature reaches 133 degrees, the pallets are held in the chamber for a certain time, usually about three hours. South Dakota’s harsh winters can sometimes necessitate a longer stay for the wooden pallets.
“If it’s zero degrees or below, we might be looking at double that time,” Ellis said. “They’ve got to be bug free and bark free.”
Once the pallets are pulled, Mueller Pallets applies an ISPM-15 stamp that carries the agency code for Package Research Labs (PRL) and Mueller Pallets’ facility code. The stamp means the pallets are ready to ship overseas, and Mueller Pallets has no shortage of customers looking to get their products in the hands of customers on other continents.
Mueller Pallets keeps computerized records, allowing PRL to regularly drop by for inspections. Ellis said the wood packaging material inspecting agency has been great to work with.
“It’s all tied in here,” Ellis said, pointing to the computer workstation in his office. “And we have all of our cook charts in here, so when PRL comes in and wants to see them, we just pull them up and they have access to them.”
Ellis said the kiln system has not only helped Mueller Pallets expand its business, but it has also helped other pallet companies in the region.
“We’re actually treating for a couple of other pallet manufacturers as well,” he said. “We are one of the few in this area to have this capability.”
Mueller Pallets’ other major equipment upgrade is a new Wood-Mizer LT70 hydraulic sawmill at the company’s outdoor drop-off site, which sits less than a mile to the southeast. The site, off a gravel road and nestled between a pair of cornfields, accepts almost any wood that would otherwise be transported to a landfill – old pallets, dimension lumber scraps, demolition lumber, trees and limbs.
Mueller said the Wood-Mizer sawmill has given the company the capability to produce its own wood and has made Mueller Pallets less dependent on its lumber suppliers.
“Everything being hydraulic from the log loader, log roller, and leveling devices makes it much less labor intensive to run,” she said. “Also, the fact that it is computerized for the blade positioning makes it user friendly to operate.”
Workers at the drop-off site sort out reusable pallets and 4x4s and pull aside large pieces from the dry wood side. The cants, which are loaded onto the Wood-Mizer by an employee driving a Cat wheel loader with forks, can be cut into a variety of special sizes for custom products.
“It’s afforded us some work that we never had before because of the odd size of the product,” Ellis said. “The bigger planks, bigger stringers, stuff that you can’t buy locally, we make our own. It’s afforded us to be a little more competitive as well.”
Any remaining scrap lumber is fed into the Diamond Z DZH5000 mobile grinder, which pulverizes it into wood waste that’s exclusively contracted to POET LLC, one of the world’s leading ethanol companies.
“They are the only ones we can sell conventional lumber, ground-up product to,” Fodness said. “The wet product, we use some of that for landscape mulch. But probably 99% ends up at POET.”
Mueller said the only thing the company will not take is creosote treated lumber and green treated lumber. She said large steel needs to be removed, but regular nails are fine as they can go through the grinder.
Depending on the product, workers can decide if additional passes are needed, she said.
POET, which is also based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, uses the material to help power its plant in nearby Chancellor. This biorefinery features a solid waste fuel boiler that burns up to 350 tons of waste wood per day.
Fodness said the long-time partnership, which was first announced in 2007, has benefitted both companies.
Mueller Pallets’ saw room features two pop-up saws (a Whirlwind and a Northtech NT-CS18L-10) that help cut wood to length. A Morgan band resaw hones the thickness, and workers use a Modern Machine Tool Co. MMT 150A pallet stringer notcher to cut four-way notches.
Other equipment includes a Smart Products dismantler, a Trace Equipment trim track, a Unit Saw-Ram Tech Vertical package chainsaw, a Powermatic 81, a Morgan standard resaw and Whirlwind pop-up saws.
The plant has a Rayco Edge 2000 nailing machine, but the company does so much custom work that it often assembles its pallets by hand at two stations each manned by two employees. Workers set up the automated nailer for larger volume orders.
A large staging area that connects to nine bay doors allows tractor trailers to pull up and unload recyclable pallets before loading up with new ones.
Mueller Pallets used to have all of its equipment in one building, but Ellis has worked to departmentalize operations to improve cleanliness, reduce noise and give employees a little more room to work.
“It has also helped to get people more specialized,” Fodness said of Ellis’ changes. “If they’re in the saw room, that’s where they’re at constantly.”
Ellis agreed: “They’re all pretty much on one machine.”
The changes at Mueller Pallets have helped make the company more flexible to respond to customers’ needs.
For instance, a local tractor parts company was putting in steel shelving,
but decided to just put up the steel legs and have Mueller Pallets manufacture custom wood bins. A Mueller Pallets employee went over to measure the framework and produced exactly what the company needed, Fodness said.
“We’re really not afraid to take on anybody’s request that comes through,” he said. “The way everything is set up now with the kiln and the saw and the different types of equipment they have down there for the pre-manufacturing of pallets, Dan can take on just about anything anybody calls in.”
