Remove the players, referees, and goal posts from a football field. Then send in a caravan of forklifts, each depositing a load of pallets, until the entire playing area is stacked 15 feet high with 5-foot-by-5-foot wooden skids. That's how Charlie Lavis illustrates the number of wooden pallets that The Washington Post used to accumulate in one year.
"Now, imagine someone tells you to get rid of the pallets," says Lavis, national newspaper specialist for Sullivan Graphics, a commercial printer that was the main source of the Post's wooden-skid problem. Lavis says the Post's annual pallet-disposal costs were in the six-figure range.
Lavis took a hard look at the Post's pallet situation. In seven weeks, the Post received 9,600 pallets, more than half of which were broken and unusable following their initial use, while 39 percent could be used again, straight off the plant floor or with minor repairs. Yet it cost more to fix the old wooden pallets than it cost to buy new ones, Lavis says. A new wooden pallet costs about $5.
Sullivan and the Post set up a "handshake trust" in which the printed product is shipped to the Post on plastic pallets. Sullivan later collects the pallets and trucks them back to the printing plant.
The arrangement was an experiment at the time, but today many commercial printers supply plastic pallets, especially to customers ordering substantial volumes.
Perfect Pallets Inc. of Indianapolis leases pallets to commercial printers and then arranges for pickup at the newspaper plant. The three-year-old company, a contractor for four midwestern commercial printers, has 11,000 to 12,000 pallets in circulation. This third-party pallet-leasing-and-pickup program may be the only one of its kind in the industry.
Newspaper plants that buy plastic pallets for in-house use can see a return on investment in as little as one year, even on the most expensive models, experts say. Heavy-duty plastic pallets typically cost $40 to $80 each. Lightweight, less-durable plastic pallets cost as little as $25 each.
"I know of several newspapers where plastic pallets have lasted for ten years," says David Beck, manager of media technology for NAA.
Durable, plastic pallets do have some drawbacks. Some brands are difficult to stack. A bad polymer mix can compromise longevity. Some plastic pallets are rendered useless if chipped, but others contain reusable parts and can be "cannibalized" when other plastic pallets need repair. Unsalvageable parts often can be returned to the manufacturer, where they are remelted.
But proponents say the benefits of plastic outweigh the disadvantages. "A lot of newspapers really have not sat down and figured out what wooden pallets are costing them," says NAA's Beck.
Andrew Bowser is a writer on conveyance and industrial technologies. E-mail, andynola@aol.com; phone, (504) 897-4016.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.