The Environmental Benefits of Pallet Recycling in Supply Chains
When a non-reusable pallet completes its life cycle in your business, it often ends up in a landfill alongside countless others. However, there are alternatives to throwing your pallets in the trash, like pallet recycling programs. By participating, you support the pallet industry’s essential needs, provide value to your organization, and do your part to save our planet. Discover the myriad benefits of recycling your pallets through a reputable program.
Why is Pallet Recycling Important?
Before delving into the detailed reasons for the environmental and personal benefits of pallet recycling, it’s crucial to take a high-level view of the matter.
Producing wood pallets and plastic-based pallets takes a serious toll on the environment in terms of the materials required. For perspective, it is estimated that one tree provides two ten-foot-long logs on average. Each log makes four standard wooden pallets. This means over 87 million logs are used to produce the average 450 million wooden pallets created yearly!
As for plastic pallets, the primary materials used are HDPE or PP material. The former (HDPE) is created by applying intense heat to refined petroleum. The latter (PP) starts as a propylene gas produced as a by-product of petroleum refining. Both of which are environment-intensive tasks. By recycling pallets, fewer raw materials and less environmental strain is placed on the supply chain.
Four Key Environmental Benefits of Pallet Recycling
While the above offers a great high-level perspective on the importance of pallet recycling, it’s worth noting that there are four primary environmental benefits from the process:
- Resource Conservation: Producing both wooden and plastic-based pallets requires an intense amount of resources. By recycling your pallets, fewer new raw materials will need to be introduced to the supply chain. This will conserve resources for the future.
- Less Waste in Landfills: It’s been projected that seven states will run out of landfill space within the next five years and that the entire United States will run out of landfill space within the next sixty years. By simply recycling your pallets, you can help to slow this trend until a solution can be found.
- Energy Savings for Everyone: The emissions let off from the manufacturing process for both wooden and plastic-based pallets are considerable. By reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, both quality of life and health can be bolstered for everyone around the world.
- Less Transportation Pollution: Finally, few people consider the transportation pollution that occurs during the pallet manufacturing process. By recycling, all transportation pollution related to acquiring new raw materials and transporting them to manufacturing facilities will be taken away.
Make the decision to recycle your pallets today!
Clearly, there are a myriad of benefits to recycling pallets within your supply chain. Sometimes knowing how to go about this process can be a challenge. That’s why utilizing Rose Pallet’s effective pallet recycling program can help. By taking possession of your broken and unusable pallet cores in large quantities, we can recondition pallets and even create new uniquely sized pallets for those manufacturers with specific needs. Take the next step in bettering your business and our Earth by requesting a quote on your customizable recycling program.
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