Plastic or Wood Pallets. Which is Greener?
Debunking the environmental myth of plastic pallets.

For all the green rhetoric being tossed around today by the manufacturers of plastic pallets about their sustainability and recyclable nature, the facts are still the facts. Wooden pallets made from the unusable trims of the lumbering process are greener, cleaner and more environmentally friendly by any measure. A recent press release issued by a manufacturer of plastic pallets stated their desire to “be responsible stewards of the environment” and described their pallet as being “100% recyclable.” The real questions are: What does that truly mean from an environmental point of view? And can you be a responsible steward of the environment when your product is made from plastic?

Putting all the greenwashing aside, when you follow the supply and manufacturing chain of a plastic pallet from oil well, to refinery, to oil tanker, to the plastic processing plant -- and add up all the pollution and environmental stress that accumulates along the way, even something that ends up being “100% recyclable” doesn’t necessarily end up to be a champion of the environment.

Nor does it take into account the long and often dirty history of any plastic product, recyclable or not, in the amount of pollution they contribute to the earth. The simple truth is, plastic, in any form, other than its possible color, isn’t green in any measurable degree.

Consider the current controversy raging over plastic bottles and plastic bags. It’s grown so bad that many communities have begun to ban their use. Though that plastic, like the plastic that goes into plastic pallets, may be 100% recyclable, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a staggering 88% is not recycled and ends up in landfills instead. How much is that? More than 40 million bottles a day that can take up to 1,000 years before they begin to decompose once buried.

Now consider the manufacturing facilities plastics are produced in. That’s another dirty little story waiting to be told. Among the 47 chemical plants ranked highest in carcinogenic emissions by the EPA, 35 are involved in plastic production. The long and short of it is just because a product can be recycled, doesn’t mean that it is environmentally conscious when you look at its history. Plastic, whether in bags, bottles or pallets is high on the enemies list of any environmentally-conscious group or person.

To prove the point, the so-called “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a toxic island of garbage made up of 80% plastic and weighting more than 3.5 million tons, is currently floating in the Pacific between San Francisco and Hawaii. Right now it’s twice the size of Texas – and growing.

Wooden pallets, on the other hand, have a story and a product that is sustainable. According to the EPA, when wood pallets reach the end of their useful life they can be converted into value-added products like wood flooring or replacement parts for other pallets.

When a pallet is recycled in this way, it generates approximately $0.25 when sold as boiler fuel, $1.00 for replacement parts, and potentially $5.00 to $8.00 when processed into products such as flooring.

The U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station and its partners are currently proving the technical and financial feasibility of reusing and recycling wooden pallets. They have already begun the first phase of a process to test reusing wood pallets as flooring and paneling. The pilot program will take a “negative-value” material and process it into a finished material with a $4.00 to $5.00 per square foot value and increase manufacturing jobs while it decreases waste.

A win-win for the environment and all of us.

At our company, PALNET (www.palnetusa.com), our pallets are born green. They are made from the scraps left over from the lumbering process. never old growth hardwoods. When round trees are harvested, they are first “squared off” in a saw mill so the logs can be converted into lumber. These trims, instead of ending up in our already overflowing landfills, are turned into pallets and shipping products that are highly sustainable and highly useful in the shipping process.

Wooden pallets like these are the greenest part of the supply chain. They are constantly repaired and recycled and when no longer useable, they're ground up into mulch or stove pellets. They're green from cradle to grave and actually help clean up the environment by reducing waste. And nothing is greener than that.

---

Michael Smith is the C.O.O. of PALNET, a national, environmentally-friendly pallet manufacturer. He can be reached at 877-PALNET-1.