We too have heard the siren song of pallets,
From the Wall Street Journal, July 25:
Wooden pallets turn up inside homes, on roadsides and in bonfires. Tracking them down is a full-time job; just watch out for the dogs.
SYDNEY—When the world’s biggest supplier of wooden pallets tries to recover its lost property from junkyards and hard-to-find lots, things can get ugly.
“If you’re in Europe, it goes relatively easily. If you’re in Alabama, unfortunately sometimes a guy comes out with two dogs and a shotgun,” said Graham Chipchase, chief executive of Brambles, which owns and rents reusable pallets to companies including manufacturers, suppliers and retailers.
Wooden pallets keep global supply chains humming, carrying everything from soda cans to washing machines. Yet millions of these portable platforms go missing every month, either lost, stolen or broken.
Finding them is an additional load for the multibillion-dollar industry. While the product costs only around $20 each and is typically made of sawed wooden planks held together with nails, suppliers like Brambles own hundreds of millions of pallets. Replacement costs can quickly run to millions of dollars each year.
Enter the “pallet detectives”—former law-enforcement personnel on Brambles’ payroll. Their job is to track down leads and hunt out stray pallets so they can be returned to the Australian company, which has a market value of about $14 billion, making it about the same size as Campbell Soup.
A few pallets resurface as makeshift shelving or wall art. Some are repurposed as coffee tables. For thrifty households wanting to introduce a bit of industrial chic to their boudoirs, the humble pallet’s versatility lends itself to a bed base.
Still more pile up on the side of the road, creating eyesores and irking neighborhoods. Others are targeted by thieves or used by organized crime gangs to move drugs.
For such simple, coarsely constructed items, pallets can be surprisingly highly valued. Susana Márquez Pedrouso was working for Nike in the early 2000s when a colleague realized a manager was stealing something from a stockroom filled with top-of-the-range sneakers. The colleague hid near the backdoor to find out what it was.
“He caught the manager bringing a pallet out from the store into his van. I couldn’t believe it. I thought we were talking about Nike shoes,” said Pedrouso, a Madrid-based security consultant. Her colleague told her the pallets were in demand and could be sold.
Following the trail of a lost pallet often resembles police casework, with detectives leaning on a mix of new technology, old-fashioned shoe leather and human ingenuity.
“They’re very good at collecting evidence and times and photographs,” Chipcase, the CEO, said of detectives. “To do that, you don’t necessarily want to be in a Brambles-branded vehicle.”
To help employees in the field, Brambles has screwed around 450,000 GPS trackers onto the blue-painted pallets leased by its CHEP business. The trackers, which cost $60 each, ping every hour or two to provide near real-time location data.
It can still be difficult for detectives, who include former local police and highway-patrol officers, to locate the pallets and bring them home. On one occasion, a Brambles employee resorted to flying a drone-mounted camera over a yard when the owner denied hoarding pallets that trackers showed were nearby.
“We found all the blue pallets in the middle and the white ones placed around the side so you couldn’t see them from the road,” said Chipchase....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
"The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy"
Logistics: And Now There's A Shortage Of Pallets: Prices Up 400%
We've been here before, see after the jump...
Supply chain 'stretched' for cardboard boxes, wood pallets: Thomas
Logistics: "On Stretch Wrap"
Following on the hubbub our linkfests "Pallets" and "Pallets: The Sequel" created, it is time for Stretch Wrap....
