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36 PalletCentral • September-October 2020 palletcentral.com BLOG FROM NATURE'S PACKAGING PALLET RECYCLING EQUIPMENT TRENDS A s the recycled pallet sector continues to evolve, it finds itself facing new challenges such as pallet quality, the need for higher throughput, and labor availability constraints. Increasingly, however, creative machinery providers are helping recycled pallet business operators to clear these hurdles and others. Here is what's trending. From Work Cells to Integrated Production Systems The legacy approach to wood pallet recycling revolved around each process as a separate work cell. Sorting, dismantling, board trimming, and repair tables all ran as stand-alone activities, requiring a lot of manual stacking and unstacking activity as well as forklift movement of material between workstations. For several reasons, the cell approach no longer makes sense. Consider that hiring good people has become challenging. Automation helps to increase productivity by reducing handling labor inherent in the work cell approach. Design improvements such as conveyors and tippers result in improved ergonomics, and the systems approach helps keep potentially dangerous forklift activity away from workstations. By boosting productivity, automation reduces the need to add more staff as businesses grow. Finally, many recycling operations are getting larger over time, and are therefore in a better position to invest in such equipment and reap the benefit of it. "We see a lot more system integration with multiple machines, and conveyance all being designed as a system so that you gain more efficiencies," one leading provider of pallet recycling equipment commented to Nature's Packaging. "Our customers are asking for system design." Equipment that Facilitates More Efficient Re-manufacturing An ongoing concern has been the gradual deterioration of used pallet or pallet core quality. As one recycled pallet sales executive recently observed, "While 70 to 80 percent of recycled pallets were repairable in the past, now the number is more like 60 to 70 percent, with most of those being lower grade pallets rather than the premium grade wood pallets that many customers prefer." With fewer repairable pallets, recycling has become much more than simply slapping a board or two onto a pallet and shipping it out the door to a customer. The importance of pallet re-manufacturing continues to grow. Pallet re-manufacturing involves the production of new pallets from recycled components. This process has been largely manual – the variability of reclaimed Nature's Packaging® is a collaborative project of the National Wooden Pallet & Container Association, the Canadian Wood Pallet & Container Association, and the Western Pallet Association. Funded by the Pallet Foundation, the project delivers sound, fact-based materials on the environmental opportunities associated with wood packaging selection decisions. Wood packaging is the most recycled, most sustainable packaging product on the planet. Companies are well aware of their packaging options. Wood remains dominant because companies value wood's unique combination of durability, customization, cost efficiency, safety, and its unparalleled environmental attributes. Learn more at NaturesPackaging.org.

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