United Pallet Services (UPSI), makers of the pointGUARD Pallet Protector, is partnering up with the Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design (CPULD) at Virginia Tech University to bring an education presentation during Pack Expo International next month. With the goal of educating supply chain attendees on enhancing the strength of wooden pallets to make them more reusable, the session will be part of the Reusable Packaging Association’s (RPA) Learning Center, an education forum that brings real-life, solution-based sessions to attendees free of charge. The Learning Center will be located inside the RPA Pavilion, which groups members into one location during Pack Expo.
The session, to be held Monday, November 3 from 12:00 p.m. – 12:45 p.m., will be titled “Best Practices for Getting the Most out of your Wooden Pallet: Ways to reduce pallet damage, pallet operation costs, and pallet-related product damage for optimal reusable results” and will focus on captive or closed-loop wooden pallets. “Many companies struggle with the durability issue with wood pallets. Our goal of this session is to provide a presentation that will shed light on how to make a wooden pallet the most reusable asset that it can be,” said Callen Cochran, Business Development Manager for the pointGUARD Pallet Protector. “By partnering with the CPULD at Virginia Tech, we know that attendees of this session will be given some useful strategies from an organization that is considered one of the experts in the packaging field.”
Although the presentation will be sponsored by the pointGUARD Pallet Protector, the session will be taught by Laszlo Horvath, Director at the CPULD and Assistant Professor of Practice at the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials.
In addition to the session, both UPSI and the CPULD will be operating separate booths at Pack Expo, which will be held in Chicago’s McCormick Place, November 2nd – 5th. The UPSI/pointGUARD booth will be located in Booth 6955 inside the Reusable Packaging Pavilion and the CPULD Booth 17, will located in the Education and Workforce Development Pavilion.
CPULD has been evaluating pallets made of a diverse range of materials for more than 40 years, played a role in the development of The Pallet Design System. CPULD has facilitated all of the ASTM and FasTrack testing on the pointGUARD Pallet Protector products and is currently conducting a product damage analysis on the new SP40S pointGUARD. UPSI was started in 1994 when two pallet companies merged to form one of Northern California’s largest pallet companies.