Could Plastic Spell the End of Disposable Wooden Pallet?
by Timothy B. Hurst Long before consumers are faced with the ubiquitous “paper or plastic” question at the grocery store, cloth bag (re)users not withstanding, another version of that question is also being answered on the wholesale side of the equation. And with increasing frequency, producing and manufacturers are saying yes to plastic — pallets that is. Although the trend is toward an increasing percentage of pallets being reused or recycled (and therefore diverted from landfills), a 1999 study by researchers at the Department of Wood Science and Forest Products at Virginia Tech University found approximately 4.2 million tons of wood pallet materials were land-filled at municipal solid waste facilities in the U.S. annually in the 1990s — a figure equivalent to 1.4 percent of total waste and 19.6 percent of total wood waste deposited at landfills. That same study found that an astonishing 40 percent of all hardwood harvested in the U.S. is for pallets, about two-thirds of which are
