Maximizing plastic pallet usefulness

It’s always good to check in on pallets every so often. Otherwise, it can become just too automatic to continue using them as you have always been using them. So, I reached out to Alison Zitzke, senior product manager at ORBIS Corp.

There was, however, one precondition to our discussion. No sustainability. We’ve all heard so much lately about sustainability with pallets and other types of packaging. This is a chance to talk about other topics. Our 45-minute conversation covered many topics and angles on plastic pallets. However, durability and life cycle usefulness seemed to dominate. Here’s what’s on Zitzke’s mind.

Durability of plastic pallets is key to their usefulness, says Zitzke, and it all starts with the Tommy test. As it turns out, Tommy is a mythological 300-pound warehouse veteran who knows every way possible to abuse a pallet.

Even if the actual person’s name isn’t Tommy, Zitzke encourages someone at every facility to give it their best shot to determine the limits of abuse that plastic pallets can endure. “Almost always, they can’t destroy it. That’s how resilient plastic pallets are,” she says.

As it turns out, Zitzke and the people at ORBIS take these challenges personally. The company’s new generation 40 x 48-inch Odyssey plastic pallet was sent to the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design for more abuse than Tommy could ever muster.

The pallets were subjected to the Center’s FasTrack life-cycle analysis to compare durability to a 40 x 48-inch whitewood stringer pallet. The plastic pallet survived 400 cycles of standardized abuse without failure. Average failure for the wood pallets was 11 cycles. Don’t need to say much of anything else.

There are other limits to the length of a plastic pallet’s usefulness, too. It’s easy to just keep using pallets until they are no longer usable. Most everyone is guilty of that. And it’s not uncommon for reckless use to actually reduce the life cycle of pallets.

Fortunately, says Zitzke, better handling practices can extend the life of pallets. Her suggestions range from not jamming fork tines into pallets, not pushing pallets on the floor rather than picking them up, and ensuring fork tines are fully inserted to avoid pallet bending.

Along these lines, those Odyssey pallets have molded-in frictional elements that limit load shifting and prevent slippage off fork tines. The idea is to control unintended movement of a pallet load on lift trucks and automated equipment.

There is one other way to get some extra usefulness out of pallets: tracking them. As Zitzke explains, some users ask about the options for tracking plastic pallets. They view pallets as valuable assets they want to make maximum use of for as long as possible.

Knowing where pallets are and their availability for use at any given time can extend their useful life. While cost might be a deterrent, Zitzke is a strong proponent of users determining if tracking has value in their operations.