Many industries heavily rely on the use of pallets for everyday operations, but these can produce a lot of waste. As these pallets wear down and break, you’ll need to dispose of them and purchase new ones to replace them. However, you can recycle your pallets, which comes with various environmental benefits. Here’s a look at the benefits of recycling your pallets for your business.
Using Fewer Trees
Creating new pallets means using fresh resources from the environment—cutting down trees for wood. Every new pallet puts a bigger strain on the consumption of wood. Recycling your pallets means you don’t use fresh wood from new trees and don’t put that strain on the environment. Instead, you transform the old pallets into quality new ones that you can continue using.
Less Energy Use in Production
Manufacturing isn’t just about the resources you consume to create the physical product; production consumes energy to make the machines work and power the facility. Making a new pallet from nothing will take much more energy, as the process requires more machines and production steps. Recycling your old pallets into new items will consume less energy than making new products from scratch.
Limiting Waste Output
One of the major environmental impacts pallets have is as landfill items. When you throw a pallet away, it goes directly to landfills and only adds to those large piles. By recycling your pallets, you can keep them out of landfills and use them for longer. This will decrease the amount of waste your company disposes of, benefitting the environment.
Improving Sustainability
Every company should worry about the sustainability of their practices, as they can limit environmental effects. Sustainable practices mean you can continue to do this for a long time without as many negative environmental effects—perfect for a business looking at the long-term goals of the company. Many sustainable practices help save money too.
Easy Disposal
Pallets break down as you continue to use them, even though they can lift huge loads. No matter what you use the pallets for, you’ll eventually need to repair and replace them. Some businesses send off broken pallets to a landfill or some other trash collection site, but that takes effort and time and isn’t sustainable. It’s far better to dispose of your pallets with a recycling program, as you can easily set aside the pallets and have the recycling program pick them up for you. Additionally, you can recycle the wood yourself, using it for other tasks.
Creating New Products
One amazing part of recycling your pallets is the new products you can create. Pallet recycling programs can transform old pallets into a variety of useful items, including new pallets to replace the ones you recycled. If the pallet isn’t suitable for recycling into another pallet, it can be recycled into another item to keep the material out of landfills.
Using Wood Over Plastic
When focusing on the environmental benefits of your pallets, you need to consider the materials that make the pallets. Most use wood or plastic as their base materials, and both are recyclable. However, plastic is far more impactful on the environment than wood, and processing it puts more strain on resources. Therefore, it’s environmentally friendly to use wood pallets over plastic ones.
Biodegradable Materials
Although it’s best to recycle your pallets when you can, there are times when that’s just not possible. Fortunately, in addition to being great for recycling, wood pallets are also biodegradable. This means your pallets will break down in the environment, preventing longstanding trash wherever you throw these pallets. This is very important, as even if your pallets end up in a landfill, they will break down and won’t contribute to the pile forever.
Communal Pallet Supply
One of the main benefits of using a recycling program for your pallets is how you benefit the whole community. These programs rely on people signing up and sending in their pallets for recycling. The program will then take the pallets and make them into new wood pallets that you can purchase for a significantly lower price than brand-new ones. This means that the more people who sign up for the programs, the easier it is to purchase used pallets to restock the pallets you need.
Health and Safety
A good recycling program incentivizes you when it comes to pallet care and replacement. This is very important, as taking good care of your pallets is necessary for the safety of your workers. Pallet breakdown is a big risk for workers. If a pallet breaks while a worker is using it, this can result in serious injury. To avoid incident, check your pallets every few weeks to catch any breaking or dangerous pallets before someone is hurt. If you find any broken pallets, you can remove them from your worksite and immediately hand them over to a recycling program. The program can then recycle the pallets and offer the new products to the community. This helps prevent some of the bigger risks of workers using old pallets.
Saving Money
A huge part of recycling pallets doesn’t just relate to the environmental benefits, though those are certainly important. Another reason to consider recycling pallets is that you save money, as it’s far cheaper to use and purchase used pallets than new ones. Plus, you don’t lose any pallet quality. You can then reinvest this money in your company and incorporate other green practices that will also save money.
Taking care of the environment as a company can be difficult, as you need to worry about your profits to continue growing. However, recycling your pallets is an easy way to benefit the environment and lower your impact while saving money as a business. By prioritizing recycling your pallets, you’ll help support the community and improve your business at the same time. If you want to join a recycling program or simply purchase used pallets, you can contact us at First Alliance Logistics Management LLC. Reach out to our company today!
