PalletOne Helps Customer Achieve Waste Reduction Goals

BARTOW, FL – January 17, 2014 – By designing a new pallet for use internally, the PalletOne team assisted a customer in eliminating more than 25,000 pounds annually of corrugated waste. The customer, an international, multi-site plastics manufacturing company, was interested in eliminating the cardboard honeycomb dunnage that arrived with their cardboard box packaging, a goal PalletOne helped them successfully meet by designing a custom inverted pallet to replace the dunnage.

Benefits to the customer:

• A 28,000-pound reduction in incoming corrugated waste annually, the equivalent of five truckloads
• Progress towards achieving waste reduction, recycling and sustainability goals
• Reduced materials handling and transportation costs
• Increased warehouse safety
• Improved relationship with packaging supplier
• The potential for project replication across locations

Made of heavy-duty cardboard, the honeycomb dunnage acted as a pallet for packaging transport and storage. As part of its recycling efforts, the customer bales all paper and cardboard waste for recycling, but the dunnage was too cumbersome to be baled.

The reusable wooden pallets designed by PalletOne replace the cardboard dunnage. Inverted with the notches on top, this pallet design allows the customer to easily lift their packaging off of the pallets through the inverted notches without damaging it, and also move the pallets themselves through the sides. The new pallets are used over and over again internally to move and store the box packaging.

Because the dunnage couldn’t be baled, there was extra handling and transport involved in removing them for recycling that has been eliminated. The space the dunnage occupied on the outgoing recycling trucks is now free to be used for additional baled cardboard waste, resulting in fewer trips. Warehouse safety and organization has also been improved, with the wooden pallets creating straighter, neater and more stable packaging stacks.

The customer’s corrugated supplier, who was manufacturing the dunnage specifically for this purpose, is also pleased with the change. Using the wooden pallets eliminates the manufacturing process and extra handling, and they have also been able to fit more packaging on the truck, reducing the number of truckloads they must send.

This solution was first implemented in just one of the customer’s facilities, but because there are several other facilities that use the same packaging, it’s a benefit across the organization that they are in the process of replicating. The customer considers the project a success, calling the PalletOne team accommodating, customer oriented, and forward thinking.