The Magic of Pallets 250
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 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, I liked how palettes went from 16 colors on the Commodore 64, to 4096 on the original Amiga, then we had True Color and 24 bit and all that jazz.
But what does this have to do with shipping pallets? Your comment has left a bad taste in my palate.
Like many inventions ... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yeah exactly, which came first? The pallet is virtually useless without the fork. I wonder if the fork jack was invented first, but people got tired of the lower row of boxes in every stack being punctured. :p Some innovative person somewhere thought about it and realized the need for a frame to support the stack of boxes over the forks. But how did they decide to call it a pallet?
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. But how did they decide to call it a pallet?
I'm not sure about how that was decided, but I will note that an older definition [thefreedictionary.com] of the word was "A temporary bed made from [straw] bedding arranged on the floor, especially for a child". Perhaps they envisioned the wooden frames as temporary beds for products to rest on?
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Very true.
"Humans passing things hand over hand" is actually a pretty cool "invention", when you think about it. Amazingly adaptable.
We sure couldn't get pallets down the hatch of a submarine. Instead, everyone lined up, from the pier down to where we were stacking the cans.
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Interesting. I bet you also needed to employ some interesting storage techniques because of the cramped quarters.
Reminds me of this scene [youtube.com].
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Interesting. I bet you also needed to employ some interesting storage techniques because of the cramped quarters.
Reminds me of this scene [youtube.com].
You bet correctly.
For example, supplies like flour and lard came in tall rectangular "cans" (metal containers with a pry-off lid). We would strap those to the deckplates and then just walk on top of them.
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Even without them, it's easier to shift palettes than individual boxes.
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the shipping container is just one large box like pallet.
why is it so hard for people to see that?
anyways, either are an improvement over moving sacks..
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:5, Informative)
Really?
Last I saw, they're moving to flatter, sturdier, permanent-use molded plastic pallets that have integrated RFID and compartments for things like GPS and batteries, that are meant to be used for many years. Sure, pallets take some vertical space, but the amount of space taken is small compared to the ability for one person to move close to two tons of cargo single-handedly across smooth floors with no more than a jack.
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:5, Informative)
Please stop commenting about something you don't know shit about, you're just embarrassing yourself.
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:5, Informative)
It takes time to build pallets. It takes time to break apart, resort, and rebuild pallets. It costs money to repair and replace the pallets themselves. Pallets require extra ceiling space to actually pick them up and put them into a truck or container, resulting in wasted volume in that truck or container. The logistics industry is quickly moving away from pallets for everything but long term storage.
Actual truck driver here. No they're not or at least in Europe they're not. You can load a pallet onto a truck with just a couple of inches clearance, enough for the skids on the pallet not to slide along the floor. What actually determines pallet height and therefore wasted space in a truck is the racking at the warehouses. Its the spacing between the shelving on the racking. Rented pallets is the model used the most with Chep being the largest player in the world. Most large companies won't accept goods unless they're on Chep pallets, that's how well they're built and how well designed the rental system is. You don't need to worry about the time it takes to build pallets or repair them because Chep take care of that. You merely send one of your trucks in to a Chep factory en-route back to load up 300 pallets or get Chep to deliver them and collect the damaged ones.
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Yes, actually. There is a niche in the logistics business of moving pallets from where they are unloaded to where they are loaded. Also, as others have indicated, there are cottage businesses associated with refurbishing and recycling damaged/end-of-life pallets.Some are just stacked. Fancy operations will strap them into pallet sized cubes.
Re: CHEP pallets, I've got a story about those!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That was the whole point of the pallet - no standardized container.
Forget the article - do we no longer even bother to read the summary?
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:5, Insightful)
but isn't the pallet a standardised container - albeit without walls and a top?
Its standard width, and length means it fits into standardised holes in warehouses and can be moved with standardised vehicles. The shipping container is no different except it has walls to keep stuff together.
the point I take is that its the standardisation that matters. True in so many areas.
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I would say a very loose standard. There are a variety of pallet dimensions. Sometimes you get stuck moving a pallet that the hand jack can't fit into.
At least forklifts have more articulated and usually thinner tines that can be adjusted to fit pretty much everything.
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For as long as I've been working, the size of a EUR-pallet has been pretty fixed at 1200x800x144mm - sure, there are some variations, but the base-size still applies.
There are some unofficial half-sized pallets, usually molded plastic, designed to fit 2 in the space of one EUR pallet.
Outside of Europe? You still see EUR pallets, or cheap pallets made to ca the same size (but inferior quality).
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they burn a little too well, remember at a friend's apartment we suddenly had roaring flames coming out the top of the chimney with just a few pallet boards. we doused that in a hurry, "stack fire" in a 200 unit apartment building wouldn't be good.
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You need some standardization. Trucks and train cars need to be a certain width for the pallets to fit. Forklifts and pallet jacks need to be somewhat standard to fit the pallets.
Granted it doesn't have to be terribly precise, but there has to be some kind of coordination.
It reminds me of that old joke about why the Space Shuttle (and now SLS) design is influenced by the width of a horses ass.
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The Ford Transit was designed specifically to hold two euro-size pallets. Apparently the american pallet is about 30% larger than a euro pallet, but the euro-pallet is a lot easier to get up narrow stairways common in the ultra-dense cities of europe, south america, india, china etc and the smaller size allows the vehicle to get down streets and alleyways that a standard UPS van might not be capable of.
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the euro-pallet is a lot easier to get up narrow stairways common in the ultra-dense cities of europe, south america, india, china etc and the smaller size allows the vehicle to get down streets and alleyways that a standard UPS van might not be capable of.
The narrow streets I get, but how do you move a loaded pallet up a stairway?
Re:Like many inventions ... (Score:4, Informative)
> It reminds me of that old joke about why the Space Shuttle (and now SLS) design is influenced by the width of a horses ass.
Two horse's asses. Wagons were sized according to the width of two horses, and roads were in turn sized to fit the wagons. When underground mining got serious, the mining wagons were just converted outdoor wagons, still pulled by two horses. Then they started putting rails under the wagons, to allow moving heavier loads with less friction. Rail lines began to be used outdoors, pulled by horses at first, so the rail spacing continued to be suitable to the width of two horses. One engines replaced horses, the rails stayed the same width. Go look at train tracks today, you will see they are the right size for two horses to fit.
The Solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle were shipped by rail from Utah to Florida, and thus had to fit on railcars on the standard rail spacing. In turn, the size of the boosters set the lift capacity of the rocket, and thus how big the Shuttle Orbiters could be. Finally, the Space Station modules had to fit in the Orbiter, so the Space Station's design is dictated by the width of two horse's asses.
I may have been responsible for this analysis about 30 years ago at Boeing. I was both designing launch vehicles, and had a hobby interest in the history of technology. It is also possible it came up in a USENET discussion on sci.space back then. I don't remember any more.
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And standardized shipping containers. They make everything else happen.
They didn't make pallets happen. Pallets were widely adopted during WW2. Standardized intermodal shipping containers [wikipedia.org] were first used in the mid-1950s, and were not widely adopted until the 1960s.
and they make big bonfires, too (Score:3)
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Re:and they make big bonfires, too (Score:5, Funny)
>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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Why go through all the effort of removing the nails when you're about to remove the wood?
If you pull the nails out properly, you can reuse them again. Something I learned from my father. He always had a coffee can of odd nails he pulled from old pallets and other wooden debris. That's something he learned from his father during and after WWII to avoid wasting hard-to-get material.
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And you get usable lumber and nails to make stuff out of.
Burning them is a waste.
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One of the big advantages of pallets over boxes or containers is that they are cheap enough that shipping them back isn't something you need to worry about in many cases. Yes, if there's a load (or a regular truck) going back to where they need to be loaded it's often better to ship back and re-use, but if they are delivering something and there's no load going back any time soon, they are cheap and easy enough to take apart that they can be discarded and used for other purposes.
Re:and they make big bonfires, too (Score:5, Interesting)
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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No, you've got it backwards: Money is time. Specifically it's tokens representing time you've spent doing X for someone else, which you can then give to a third party in exchange for them spending their time to do Y. It's time that is the limited resource - you can get money lots of ways, but all the money in the world won't buy you a single day of additional time.
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Not always. Going to a 1018 grade steel (0.18%) essentially renders the steel non-magnetic (you lose about 97% of the permeability of decent magnetic steel). Not stainless (still low enough carbon to rust easily), but very weak in terms of magnetism. I design and build audio transducers for a living, and work with various grades of magnetic (and non-magnetic) steel daily. Getting much above 0.15% carbon content or annealing the steel, and you lose a lot of the magnetic properties (permeability goes to p
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Then burn them and drag a magnet through the ashes to collect the nails.
Where I live (Pacific Northwest) you can't drag a magnet through sand on a beach - It becomes covered in the sand grains that are ferrous.
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Considering all the other toxic chemicals that a typical palette is treated with, I'm not sure the galvanized nails are the wort of your worries.
That's a valid concern, but in theory pallets are marked so that you can identify what they're made of, and some of them are just made of untreated wood. I would imagine that this mostly applies to domestic-only shipments.
I know welding is a BAD idea without a breather, but is a wood fire even hot enough to cause problems?
Yeah, zinc vaporizes right around a mere 500 degrees, you can easily exceed that by burning a stack of pallets. Whoops! Been to that bonfire already.
The Box (Score:4, Informative)
"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
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Thanks Mark
More job loss (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:More job loss (Score:5, Funny)
Solution: a pallet tax. The money from the tax will go to ... well, nevermind where the money goes. We need to tax these job-killing pallets now!
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Ok, who left the door open and let the union guy in?
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Pretty sure lots of the people that would have come back from the war to do that work, wound up getting an education, and becoming lawyers and bureaucrats.
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You've convinced me. remove my /sarcasm tag
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Think of how expensive everything would be if all the pallets didn't exist requiring extra workers at the ports...
Re:More job loss (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, that is what the parent post said and was specific to use sarcasm tag for people who he knew wouldn't get it to accent the point that ignorant luddits should in principle be against every labour saving innovation that people come up with, not just the most obvious (machines, computers, robots), but everything we do. Everything we invent and innovate is a labour saving device somehow. To stop that would be to give up on the idea of humans changing environment to improve our circumstances. Luddits want to stop progress, be it computers and robots or pesticides and pallets. The parent comment was pointing it out, not complaining about it.
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Give them a rifle and send them to the front lines.
Re: More job loss (Score:2)
It continues to be difficult to outsource unloading goods at ports. Reducing the job count, yes. Shifting jobs to the break bulk warehouses, yes. Even to the retail shelves. But eliminate?
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A warehouse that needed 10 burly guys can now get by 2-3. Heck many can get by with one or two full time and 1-2 part time. Said business can easily shift tens of millions of dollars of equipment annually.
The same is holding true in the front office needing only 1-2 people for accounting.
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And even with this job reducing tech they are still able to find a need to ship millions of dollars of equipment annually.
4 Days? (Score:3)
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its the union regulations that slow it down.
Re:4 Days? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:4 Days? (Score:5, Informative)
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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Well the calculation would assume they were not using a motorized pallet jack, since it was comparing the 1920s
But even then, it depends on how heavy the pallets are.
Re:4 Days? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I worked with 80 pound grain sacks, so that is a little over 15 sacks per minute. Over 2 guys, that is 1 every 8 seconds. Which, when the sack is handed to you, you walk o
Pallet ecosystem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Pallet ecosystem (Score:5, Informative)
slashvertisement (Score:4, Informative)
there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios
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So ... are you a Rice Krispies fan, or what?
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He's just unhappy they aren't eating Quisp instead.
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I preferred Quake.
Re:slashvertisement (Score:5, Funny)
Personally, I find either brand to be unpalatable.
No love for forklifts? (Score:3, Informative)
Arguably, pallets are just accessories for the machine that actually does the work. I'd like to see people unload a boxcar full of pallets by hand.
Re:No love for forklifts? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Magic Hospital Pallet (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Invasive Species Introduction in Wood Pallets (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Also plastic. Possibly not quite as recyclable as cardboard, but I suspect the service life would be much longer.
Re:Invasive Species Introduction in Wood Pallets (Score:5, Informative)
This is why there are now standards for what wood can be shipped internationally. All wood packaging entering the United States (Pallets, Cable spools, crates, etc...) is supposed to be fumigated and treated to avoid this. This is one of the things that import inspections actually do catch.
Pallet comments (Score:4, Funny)
This comment was on a pallet.
But the longshoremen were on break. Union rules, sorry.
Re:Pallet comments (Score:5, Funny)
I find your joke unpalletable.
Basement dwellers... (Score:3)
Tool palettes in GUIs are pretty cool too (Score:2)
barrels were cool too... (Score:2)
Just for the record barrels were probably equally revolutionary in their time. And the ability for a person to roll them before machinery was quite an advantage.
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Just for the record barrels were probably equally revolutionary in their time. And the ability for a person to roll them before machinery was quite an advantage.
And before that -- amphorae.
Re:barrels were cool too... (Score:5, Funny)
Just for the record, barrels are a menace.
Signed,
Mario.
Feed 8 million GI, what about USSR? (Score:2)
Summary says:
the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—"the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere,"
I wonder how USSR managed it, since they have an even greater amount of soldier deployed
Re:Feed 8 million GI, what about USSR? (Score:5, Insightful)
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They were defending their own country, rather than on the other side of an ocean.
That remove the oversea transport problem, but moving food and supply to million of soldiers is still a challenge.
Oblig. (Score:2)
alt.fan.pallets
Pallets (Score:2)
While am no fan of Hugh Pickens, I do love pallets and logistics in general, and like this article.
As my dad is a truck driver, as a kid I would go with him on trips and see the inner workings of the industry that literally keeps the country rolling. Most trucks would take on empty pallets in exchange for full ones they offloaded. But the trucks did not always go back to the same location that they made the pickup at. I asked him once what happens to all the extra pallets that end up at the receiving end? H
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Interestingly enough the article mentions iGPS. I saw a good number of their pallets (they have branding on them) at Costco the other day.
They're helping us (Score:2)
I work for a large annual convention, and at our most recent event we took our first baby steps into using pallets. We got a bunch of plastic pallets and a pallet jack to move them.
For us, it's about doing our load-in and load-out at the venue quickly. Before, we'd have one or two trucks doing the rounds between our storage space and the venue. The trucks would arrive, and then we'd load everything into the trucks one piece at a time (using boxes, at least), and then the trucks would go off and we'd sit on
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This already exists in sorts. Many pallets are shrink wrapped and have corners added that increase the rigidity of them. These corners are anything from wood slats, cardboard slats to other materials as needed/determined by the shipper to ensure the products arrive safely. Some are banded using metal or nylon straps and use tops that lock the products into place using their casing material as sort of walls.
Most material is placed on the pallets in interlocking patterns that allow the weight of the level on
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Jesus Christ, the word is P A L L E T. It's the FOURTH FUCKING WORD IN THE HEADLINE. Are you not aware of copy + paste? It's been around for forty years!
I'm in Quebec, you insensitive clod :-)
Seriously though, I am, and the french word is palette. We kind of mix-n-match, which results in mistakes like this one.
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There is, used in most supermarkets (certainly in the Uk in Ireland since the eighties at least) a system of aluminium cages. usually 3 sides to them and wheels like shopping trolleys. The bottom folds up and the sides fold to the back.
picked and filled at the warehouse. dragged onto a truck dragged off at the supermarket emptied on the shop floor. empty trolleys back on the truck. Exceptions seem to be drinks slabs of coke and bottles. which tend to be palletized.
for garden centres there is another syste