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According to company vice president Gary Sharon, Litco International’s engineered molded wood retailer pallets and bases “have a dense surface, dimensional consistency, rounded corners, no pests, odors and mold.”
42 / APRIL 2018 / PRODUCE BUSINESS
Pallet is fabricated in-house with select wood from trusted mills, each style custom-de- signed to safely protect the specific package it will carry. Prima fruit is always shipped on new, clean, unused pallets, which are moni- tored through packing, storage and shipping. All of our Prima Pallets are one-way pallets. We don’t want them back.”
Once used, the pallets from Gerawan Farming are sold to be recycled or repaired and used again by someone else.
“We sell any used and broken pallets to third-party pallet companies,” says Schutz. “They normally fix the pallets and sell them to other companies that may use them. That is just too risky for us. We always stack our fruit on new, and never previously used, Prima Pallets.”
Once a wooden pallet is “discarded” the material may move on to live again in any one of a number of functions.
“There are multiple ways wood pallets are recycled,” says Ferri. “For example, a company that is a recycler or collector will pick up/buy used pallets. They remove the old/broken boards, repair and replace with new boards, then resell those pallets. Those old, unusable boards, make their way to a massive chipper where the fasteners (nails) are removed and they’re converted to other useful products, like landscape mulch, animal bedding or
biofuel.”
Technology created primarily for food
safety purposes may also play an important role in inventory control by tracking pooled and reused pallets.
“iGPS [Intelligent Global Pooling Systems] has RFID tags installed in each pallet and also uses barcodes to keep track of its assets and determine dwell times,” says Schutz. “The preferred way to keep track of pooled pallet assets is by having the shipper “move” the pallet from origin to destination by entering the specific information into an online application. This has become the preferred way to move and keep track of pooled pallets in our industry.”
This ability to track movement could be the basis of technology taking resource conservation to an entirely new level.
“The circular economy is top-of-mind for CHEP and its sustainability efforts — after introducing the share and reuse plat- forms concept more than 60 years ago,” says D’Emidio. “Present day, we’re constantly evaluating opportunities to reduce waste and carbon emissions and protect and preserve the use of limited natural resources. We use life cycle analysis, a robust scientific tool, to quantify sustainability benefits for our customers.” pb