Buying Pallets For Your Shipping Needs
If you ship a lot of products on trucks, using pallets to ship your items and keep them secure can be very helpful. It is crucial that the pallets be the right size to hold the products securely and properly fit the truck.
Standard Pallets
For companies that need basic pallets in bulk, buying them from a pallet company is a simple way to have them on hand when needed. Standard pallets typically measure forty-eight inches by forty inches and are six-and-a-half inches tall.
Keeping the pallets a standard size means that they will all fit in the truck correctly. Standard-sized pallets fit two wide and roughly fourteen deep in a fifty-three-foot trailer. This means a standard pallet on a standard trailer will net you twenty-eight pallets on a single layer. With a double layer, the truck can haul over fifty pallets on a load and move a lot of freight.
Custom Pallets
There are situations where the freight you are shipping needs additional support, so you may need a more substantial pallet to accommodate the load. These pallets are often custom-made by the shipper, but you can order them from a pallet company if you give them the specs for the pallets.
Check with the freight company because they need to know that the pallets are going to take up more space in the trailer to better plan the load they are putting on the truck. In some situations, the pallet will not fit in the van, or it may need to sit length-wise in the trailer, meaning there may only be room for a few pallets on the load.
The material the pallets need to be constructed from can be flexible, and you can even have the pallet services incorporate a crate into the pallet or add some additional materials to allow you to secure your products on the pallets.
Recycling Pallets
If you want to reuse the pallets you get from shipments, you can save the best ones and set them aside for reuse. Some companies will pay for used pallets to be shipped back to their facility, but this is more common for companies that use heavy, custom pallets that are cheaper to ship back than to replace.
Damaged pallets that come in on loads can be sold to pallet recyclers who will take the time to repair them and then sell them to companies needing pallets. Most recyclers will only pay a couple of dollars per pallet, but if you save the damaged ones until you have a truckload to recycle, you can offset the cost of your new pallets.
To learn more, contact a pallet supplier.
Share