Today it’s hard to imagine a world without shipping pallets, which carry countless tons of products and materials across America and around the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But a mere hundred years ago, the modern shipping pallet as we know it did not exist.
Its predecessor, known as a skid, dates back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians transported goods and building materials on simple wooden platforms. The skid was improved in the 1920s with parallel “stringers” that gave the platform more stability. But it wasn’t until the late 1930s that the first patent was filed for a double-faced pallet with openings to accommodate the tines of a forklift. The fast-moving supply chain has never been the same.
In 1941, the American Warehouseman’s Association met to discuss the need to standardize a pallet size most appropriate for the commercial warehouse industry. During World War II, the United States Navy established its first materials handling program and faced similar challenges in supporting the war effort. A war requires sophisticated logistics, and as the decade unfolded, it became clear that slow and inefficient processes at military handling depots were creating bottlenecks. A series of studies concluded that pallets and forklifts — along with the cranes, conveyors, and other equipment necessary to move them — were the most efficient ways to transport materials, and the industry evolved further.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association (now called the Consumer Brands Association) standardized the pallet we all know today. Its specifications include an overall footprint of 40” by 48” and a load-bearing capacity of at least 2,500 pounds. Soon millions of GMA-standard pallets were circulating, though many other sizes were also used depending on the situation and the origin of the shipment.
Throughout and beyond World War II, as the supply chain increased in speed and size, it became a chore to keep up with so many pallets. Pallets are cumbersome, heavy, and take up space. When they are damaged, they must be repaired or discarded and replaced. In fact, for some larger enterprises, the management of a fleet of pallets — and the logistics involved with storing, transporting, repairing, and disposing of them — literally encompasses another supply chain. The first pallet pool was established by the Australian government in 1946, and today, most major pallet providers operate a shared pooling (rental) model. This ensures that manufacturers of products and materials have access to the pallets they need, when they need them, without the hassles of owning their own pallet inventory.
The pallet pooling paradigm is further enhanced by the operation of closed-loop networks in which pallets are continually moved between shippers and retailers, often without the need for a central depot to manage inspection and shipping. The benefits of pallet pooling is that it not only saves time and makes things more efficient, but it also removes transportation legs from the process, cutting down on harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Here at iGPS, we call this our iDepot network — and our introduction of this innovation in 2008 was the first major change in decades to the logistics of pallet pooling.
Today, more than five billion pallets are in circulation around the world, with more than a third of them being used in the United States. And millions more are being manufactured every year (in fact, we are producing our own lightweight, recyclable plastic pallets around the clock). Although the industry will continue to innovate and adapt at lightning speed, it seems certain that pallet pooling will keep the supply chain humming for many years to come.
Companies aiming to boost supply chain efficiency choose iGPS plastic pallets for their shipping operations. Our lightweight, recyclable plastic pallets are part of a shared/pooled network, which lowers Total Cost of Business. For more information, contact us at 1-800-884-0225, email a specialist at switch@igps.net, or visit our contact page.
