Mind the Gap
Isaac Castella McDonald
Wooden pallets are everywhere. Stacked in skips, left on verges and pavements, at the sides of roads where lorries hurtle past them, filled with yet more pallets loaded with goods. There are billions of the things, carrying 80 per cent of the global economy’s pandemonium of commodities across seas, along motorways and to local shops.
The first US patent for a wooden pallet was filed in the 1930s and their use took off during the Second World War. The pallet, like the shipping container, has been an astounding technological success. By creating a gap between a commodity and the ground, it allows a forklift or pallet jack to get under it and shunt a whole cube of stuff on its way. This all-important vacancy means more stuff can be moved more quickly. In 2016, 43 per cent of hardwood lumber produced in the US was used to make half a billion pallets, according to researchers at Virginia Tech.
The once living raw material is used not to manufacture commodities, but to accelerate their exchange. The point of the pallet is not the pallet itself but the gap, the space, the emptiness it creates under the commodity. The commodities themselves, meanwhile, are often designed to interlock – an art known as ‘cube optimisation’ – so as not to waste valuable space on top of the pallet.
The fact that it is worth using all that wood just to make other stuff cheaper to move around shows us something about the power of efficiency in shaping our world. Pallets are the embodiment of this will-to-efficiency, the icon of an economy that extracts, moulds, transports and discards material around the globe.
The decreasing cost of transporting things, which pallets and shipping containers have enabled, is the main reason, as David Hummels has argued, for the dizzying acceleration of global trade since the 1950s. In John Lanchester’s words, ‘shipping is, in practice, free.’ Today’s seas are churned by the passage of billions of tonnes of goods, a quantity that has doubled since 2000, grown six-fold since 1970 and is thousands of times what it was at the height of the British Empire. This increase has not been matched by growth in other metrics, such as output. Pears are grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand and sold in California, while the ratio of trade to output has tripled since 1970.
It may be tempting to see pallets as a scourge similar to single-use plastics, but (according to industry figures) as many as 95 per cent of pallets are reused or recycled. And, although hundreds of millions are made each year, the industry producing them is a carbon sink.
The other day I opened the door to my flat and saw a pallet leaning against a lamppost, fresh off the boat and at ease on the strip. It was a strangely charming sight. The sheer quantity of pallets means they’re often freely available from builder’s yards and garden centres. They may deeply implicated in trade and exchange, but they also slip easily out of it. Those that aren’t recycled into wood-chip or mulch can be refashioned and repurposed – into benches, tables, bookshelves, even sheds – the free and raw material of makeshift everythings.
Comments
Carbon locked up in a forest should be locked up longer than that in a shorter lived item like a pallet, and the forest may be providing other significant ecological benefits. Even if reused and recycled several times, ultimately pallet wood will become waste and (in the UK at least) is likely to be burnt, releasing the stored carbon. This is poorly accounted for in greenhouse gas reporting, but ultimately whether carbon is defined as 'biogenic' in origin or not, keeping it out of the atmosphere wherever possible matters.
Using wood may well be better than making those half a billion pallets out of plastic, but it's definitely not a free ride.