Question

"are pallets important to the TM" The article is five years old, but he topic is still very relevant. Why?

Everyone in the trucking industry likes the convenience of rapid loading and unloading offered by loading product on pallets. THE BASIC QUESTION IS WHO PAYS FOR THE PALLETS? The shipper? The receiver? The Trucking company?

The shipper needs good wood to load the product so there is no contamination of the product. So, when the carrier comes in to load, the shipper demands the carrier bring in 24 good wood to exchange for the 24 pallets that are going out. This is especially true in the foodstuff and anything to do with health products.

The receiver takes in the good wood with product, but in his warehouse, he culls out the stacks of good wood, and junk pallets and puts them into two piles. He then gives the carrier back 24 junk pallets. If the carriers driver requests, good wood back, in many cases the receiver says "OK' you manually sort them out of the pile. Of course, the driver can/will not do that, so he takes 24 junk out.

Therefore the carrier gets in the middle of this process, and if he has a steady shipper he starts to accumulate a negative pallet balance of good wood. After he gets too high a balance, his shipper then demands he send a check for the 2,000 pallets in arrears at say $10.50 a pallet. Usually this figure is not calculated in the cost of the freight by the poor TM.   The shipper wants this money to keep buying his new white wood pallets. If not paid, the shipper may then go to another carrier, and will then continue doing this until he runs out of carriers. He then may be forced to go the CHEP a rental pallet pool in which he pays for the rental.

So the carrier and TM get stuck in the middle if white wood is being used instead of rental CHEP pallets.

Some shippers want pallets on the trailer, some do not want pallets as they use their own. It is up to the TM in the system to always have what they want, and it seldom works out.

Answer 1

The question to be answered is that if pallets are important to the trucking industry why is it not recyclable . . This is so because carriers do not have the means to recover the used pallets and reuse them for the future . As a result the carrier keeps billing the shipper for his losses . The shipper gets into a vicious cycle and keeps changing carriers to escape accumulated losses . This becomes a vicious cycle which affects the feasibility of using pallets in the trucking industry. The industry needs to have a rethink on possible methods of reusing pallets or replace them with alternatives