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Raw material pricing has everyone cringing. How can you save money on your shipping materials while still ensuring your product arrives safely? In today’s marketplace, businesses are hampered by inflation while still trying to offer products that are advantageous for customers to purchase. How do you accomplish this when material costs are going up from the time you place the order to delivery? Two words... smart packaging.  Smart design starts with understanding your product attributes and shipping environment.
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Not to be confused with the 2009 film staring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin (with some scene-stealing support from Steve Martin and John Krasinski) "It's Complicated" is the best way to describe how commodity plastic resin is priced in the marketplace. If you purchase plastic pallets, you have likely experienced this pricing volatility first hand.  Traditional factors once ruled plastic resin pricing. All that has changed. Now, it's much more complicated. In the US alone, it's estimated that 1.9 billion pallets are hard at work on the daily. Essential to supply chains, these unassuming platforms are busy transporting everything from your morning coffee to the high-tech components helping to lift rockets into space. Roughly 90% of US pallets are made from wood. That's according to the latest Annual Pallet Report published by Modern Materials Handling. With so many wooden pallets in circulation, you may be asking if wooden pallets are really a sustainable choice. Yes, yes they are.  The industry-average wooden pallet is the only product in distribution packaging to achieve a UL certified Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) The question I get most often from customers wanting to buy plastic pallets is, "how many fit on a truck?" Seems like a straightforward question, right? Well, if we're talking about standard 48x40 plastic pallets, I can tell you that we've got 26 to 30 skid spots to work with on a typical 53' dry van tractor trailer. Next comes some basic math (and maybe a tape measure). Most times we can come up with a solid count. Every once in a while we run up against an exception - usually because of a change in the truck scheduled to pick up the load.  Everything from pallet size to loading patterns to the interior dimensions of the trailer (and more) factor into calculating pallets per truck. Yes, you read that right. Plastic CP9 chemical pallets are available for quick delivery. Just recently, ten (10) truckloads of these brand new CP9 plastic pallets were successfully placed in the polymers and additives sector. A great choice for any industry, these 45x45 pallets are now stocked in our Columbus, Ohio and Memphis, Tennessee warehouses.  The broad 6-runner base on the NPP-4545-FP-CP9 evenly disperses weight for secure block stacking. Choosing a pallet fastener can be a delicate balancing act. Ideally, you want to land somewhere between a lower price-per-pallet and a fit secure enough to safely do the job. Let's first look at nails. They're commonplace and often the fastener of choice. Why? Well, nails tend to flex with the wood and help maintain strength. Nails are usually cheaper. But, nails can also fail - especially if a lot of vertical force is expected on the load. We're talking product loss or handler injury. Yikes. So... are screws better? Sometimes, yes.  A case can be made for faster or cheaper pallet fasteners. When precision matters, screws provide the best drive accuracy. |
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