Wooden pallets play an essential supportive role across a number of industries, where these versatile platforms allow for the relocation of goods and the safe storage of heavy items.
With easy access from all sides, pallets help to make the loading and unloading process easier. They can also be manoeuvred with the assistance of forklifts and pallet stackers for efficient material handling.
These essential resources are designed to be hard wearing, but they can also fall into disrepair over time. Additionally, you may find that your business requires a fresh supply of pallets as your handling needs change, where it can become expensive and logistically challenging to ensure a continuous supply.
That’s where recycling comes in. Repurposing and repairing old wooden pallets can help to save your business money whilst benefiting the environment. This approach also makes it easier to ensure that you always have the pallets you need at busy times.
Read on to find out more about pallet recycling, with a look at how this eco-friendly strategy can directly benefit your business.
Understanding Pallet Recycling
Wooden pallets are usually collected from commercial and industrial facilities separately from other waste, so that they can be recycled carefully. Pallet collections will then be sorted according to their size, wood type and condition, where usable pallets will be repaired and returned into circulation.
Pallets that can’t be repaired or repurposed will be broken up and fed into a large wood chipper for shredding. These wood chips can then be utilised for a range of further purposes, such as for construction, mulching or even as the base material for reconstituted pallets.
How Your Business Could Benefit
There are numerous ways in which pallet recycling can benefit your business, helping to boost productivity whilst also reducing your environmental impact.
Some of these benefits include:
Safer Working
In material handling and warehouse facilities, safety is always a top priority. When manoeuvring heavy loads and dealing with large vehicles, it is important that workers have the space to move around safely whilst completing the task at hand.
Recycling pallets when they are no longer usable can help to prevent workplaces from becoming cluttered, reducing the risk of preventable injuries. Beyond this, stacks of broken or old pallets can pose a fire hazard, so it is important that these are collected for recycling as soon as possible.
Recycling & Environmental Benefits
A chief benefit of recycling your pallets is that this helps to mitigate the impact of your business operations on the environment. Reusing wooden materials slows rates of deforestation, reducing landfill contributions and the emissions produced during the manufacturing and transportation process.
More specifically, estimates suggest that if 350 million pallets were recycled on a yearly basis, then this could save up to 43 million trees from deforestation. This is based on the idea that 4 wood pallets can be manufactured per log, with 2 logs produced per felled tree.
In turn, recycling will help your business to minimise its carbon footprint, allowing you to meet company-wide sustainability targets. Further to this, some customers and clients will be looking to work with businesses that prioritise the environment across their operations, so recycling your pallets can help to distinguish you from competitors.
Customisable Sizes
In a practical sense, recycling and repairing your pallets can help you to gain access to customisable sizes for your business operations. Most new pallets come in standardised dimensions, making it difficult to meet specific material handling needs. As such, you may be wasting pallet space on a daily basis because your platforms are not sized correctly.
When pallets are made from recycled materials, or if your broken pallets are repaired, you may be able to request custom dimensions for your workplace, helping to boost efficiency from start to finish.
Cost Savings
In addition to recycling your current pallet resources, your business can also choose to purchase repurposed and repaired pallets rather than new ones. This can help you to cut costs, as used pallets are usually cheaper than unused alternatives, because manufacturers won’t need to source raw materials from scratch.
Additionally, working with a pallet repair company can remove the need for new pallets altogether, as you can extend the lifespan of your existing resources. Combining these approaches of repairing old pallets and using recycled materials will inevitably save your company money over time.
Streamline Your Operations
Recycling your pallets makes it much easier to ensure that you always have enough resources to hand, even as your business grows. Often, orders of new pallets can be delayed due to a shortage of raw materials, so it can be difficult to keep up with demand.
Recycling and repairing your pallets ensures that the wood you already have remains in your vicinity, where this means that high quality pallets will be returned to you at a quicker rate than if you were ordering a brand new shipment. As a result, you will be able to streamline your entire supply chain.
Top Industries That Use Wooden Pallets
Wooden pallets may seem like a specialist item to some, but they are actually used across a variety of important industries and sectors. These include:
● Agriculture: Farms and agricultural initiatives rely on pallets for the delivery of essential goods such as animal feed and machinery, as well as for the shipment of perishable goods.
● Construction: Pallets are often seen on construction sites, where essential materials can be stacked and heavy duty vehicles can be delivered with the help of these wooden platforms.
● Manufacturing: Within factories and warehouses, wooden pallets make it easier for materials to be loaded, unloaded and shipped, facilitating essential manufacturing work on a daily basis.
● Transportation: In the transportation and logistics industry, pallets are used to relocate all kinds of goods, where large pallets can be loaded onto trucks and transported across the country.
Highlander Security Shredding: Pallet Recycling For Your Business
At Highlander Security Shredding, we provide a dependable wooden pallet removal and recycling service, where we also collect additional wood-based materials and wooden packaging.
We strive to repair as many pallets as possible in order to return these into everyday circulation. Where this isn’t possible, your pallets will be chipped and recycled, helping to create a range of new products. As such, your old pallets could continue their life as wood flooring, biomass fuel, or animal bedding.
Our wood pallet collection services are also designed to be environmentally friendly. We have a fleet of vehicles especially for wood and paper collection, where these are compact and energy efficient, compared to the oversized collection vehicles often used by other service providers.
Get in touch with our team today to find out more about our sustainable pallet removal and collection services.
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