It’s been a while, so let’s talk about plastic pallets. With CHEP’s recent plastic pallet trial for Costco and Big Blue’s subsequent decision to pass on plastic, it might be a good time to take a fresh look. CHEP declined to speak with me regarding innovations and learning associated with its recent plastic pallet project. However, I reached out to Jean-Marc van Maren, chief product officer for Cabka. He shared some thoughts about plastic pallet design and innovations he is seeing in the marketplace. Cabka is the largest plastic pallet producer in Europe and the fourth largest in the United States.
More Demand for Recycled Content
For van Maren, sustainability and circular economy thinking are critical drivers for change, helping spur interest in recycled material content and repairability. Recycled content helps avoid using virgin material, and repairability helps pallets last longer.
“Ten years ago, sustainability was something that companies did not talk about,” he reflected. “Now it’s becoming a significant driver for increased recycled content in pallets. One reason is that the amount of recycled resin in a plastic pallet proportionately reduces its carbon footprint.”
Van Maren noted that major brands are increasingly requesting PCR (post-consumer resin) content. In some European countries, there are also tax incentives for choosing products with PCR material. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, there has been discussion around implementing a tax on plastic pallets that do not have a minimum of 30% recycled content.
When it comes to recycled content, Cabka is ahead of the curve. In 1998, the company was an early adopter of using recycled content for plastic pallet production. Today, it processes 70% of its recycled plastic in-house – more than 150 kilotons of recycled material. Much of that is post-consumer waste material in Europe. In the United States, the company mainly relies on post-industrial plastic. The company also offers end-of-life plastic pallet recycling to help “close the loop.”
The Challenge of Working with Plastic Consumer Waste
While PCR content is in demand, it is much more daunting to work with than virgin resin or regrind material such as broken pallets and crates. “When you work with virgin resin, you have no variation,” van Maren explained. “When you work with regrind, you have some variation. But when you work with mixed post-consumer plastics, you have a lot of variation.”
As such, PCR must be blended and formulated to create the required mechanical properties and processability needed for consistent high-speed manufacturing. According to van Maren, PCR composition can vary between locations and even seasonally between summer and winter. Cabka leans on the expertise of its innovation center in Valencia, Spain, which has a database of more than 3,000 blends to help determine the best mix combination of stiffness and impact for a particular product design.
Plastic Pallet Design for Repairability and Recycling
Sustainability-conscious customers are now asking for repairable plastic pallets, van Maren noted. (Design for repair was also stated to be a feature of the CHEP plastic pallet for Costco.) As a result, Cabka and other plastic pallet manufacturers are designing products that facilitate easier repair and disassembly. Creating a pallet with disassembly in mind also facilitates greater efficiency in recycling, where metal or fiberglass inserts might have to be removed, for example.
Single Shot Pallets Versus Welded, Glued, or Latched Options
With CHEP choosing a multi-component plastic pallet for the Costco experiment, I asked van Maren if he thought this would be a trend going forward. He was not sure that would necessarily be the case. Cabka, he explained, has 150 different pallets in its catalog, covering a spectrum of pallet designs, including single shot (injection into a single pallet mold) as well as pallets assembled from multiple components and affixed by welding, latches, or adhesives.
From his perspective, the best pallet for the job is very much application-specific. Single shot pallets are popular for applications where cleanliness is important, for instance, where the elimination of welds and seams helps provide ease of sanitation.
Generally speaking, he said, single shot pallets are generally cheaper and more efficient to produce. Multiple-piece pallets, composed of different components, are more complex and therefore more expensive to make.
But multiple-piece pallets can have advantages, he noted, such as greater strength. For example, one mold could be used to optimize the top deck’s rib structure, and something different might make the best sense for the bottom deck or the pallet feet. Multiple-piece pallets also make it easier to insert metal or fiberglass support rods. Various components can also be made with various thicknesses or even different resins to improve durability for high-impact parts.
Anticipated Growth of Nestable Pallets
I asked van Maren about his thoughts on nestable pallets for inbound logistics. While nestable plastic pallets have long been used for distribution or downstream retail applications for decades, they have been slower to find a foothold for inbound logistics between a product manufacturer and the distribution center. Change may be on the horizon, however.
Nestable pallets, van Maren noted, have the advantage of being lighter, which allows for greater product payload as well as being able to dramatically increase the number of empty pallets that can be returned on a trailer. “If you look at all the calculations, nestable pallets have advantages over pallets that are not nestable,” he stated.
The Cabka 48×40" NestRack pallet, for example, weighs only 22 lbs. with a racking capacity of 2,700 lbs. It is conveyable on roller and chain conveyors. Compared to a 60-lb. pool pallet, that translates into 1140 additional pounds of merchandise that can be shipped before a 53-foot trailer weighs out. And for backhauls, the NestRack stacks 46 units high, dramatically reducing the number of trucks needed compared to double-faced pallets. As such, there is the opportunity for logistics cost savings, fewer miles, and a corresponding carbon footprint reduction because of logistics efficiency gains.
What’s Ahead?
To put things in perspective, I’ve been writing about plastic pallets for Pallet Enterprise since 1996. Remember that plastic pallets still represent only a tiny proportion of the U.S. and European markets. That’s a combined 5.5%, according to Cabka’s 2021 Annual Report.
Increased interest in plastic pallets that are made of recycled material, especially PCR, and that are repairable, however, will build the sustainability case for plastic and help narrow the pricing gap with wood. And products such as nestable plastics for inbound logistics have yet to achieve broad acceptance but offer interesting potential. According to van Maren, they are starting to gain traction.
Our discussion focused on plastic pallet material and design. As such, we never touched upon trends such as the continued evolution of track and trace systems or warehouse automation, both of which should steer some pallet users toward selecting better quality pallets – both in the case of plastic and wood.
