Why You Must Protect Your Pallets

When stocking produce and other goods on your premises, it’s highly likely you will achieve this through the help of pallets.

Whether you’re using the pallets as a mean of transporting your goods through your storage section / warehouse or they’re ultimately where you stack all of your produce until it’s ready to be taken out front, protecting your pallets is very important.

Why you should protect your pallets

Across the world, wooden pallets are still the most popular pallets that are used. While more companies are now investing in strong plastic pallets, the way they can deteriorate differs from that of wooden pallets. But what are the risks that damaged pallets can present?

In the US, distribution editorial DC Velocity listed 7 reasons why pallets should be protected and the risks that can emerge if they suffer damage:

1. Broken pallets have a higher potential of injuring employees
2. A damaged pallet increases the likelihood that goods stored on it will also become damaged
3. Pallet damage can lead to an increased difficulty in material handling efforts
4. Naturally, the less damage inflicted to a pallet, the long its serviceable life will be
5. Contamination is a heightened possibility when dealing with damaged pallets
6. Pallet repairs can be quite costly over time
7. Overall efficiency can be improved when all pallets are properly maintained

While the issue of a damaged pallet may not immediately seem problematic, the above 7 points prove how substantially they can affect the overall operations of a business. If employees are injured due to damaged pallets, that could come back to haunt your business in the form of injury claims and even potential breaches of workplace health and safety.

Additionally, if a weakened pallet could mean produce stored on it may fall off, this could then lead to damaged produce and lost profit for your business. Sure, it may seem unlikely, but just take one of the wooden planks coming loose, and then produce and goods could easily roll off or fall through the pallet.

Pallet damage is often overlooked, but just because the damage may be minor doesn’t mean it couldn’t truly impact on your business’s employees, produce and operational efficiency.

Maintaining your pallets

When it comes to the maintenance of pallets, it’s all about ensuring you both invest in high quality pallets from the start and then employ an operational standard for all your workers that dictates how they should handle pallets.

Some obvious points and rules that would need to be followed is that your staff don’t mistreat the pallets. So there’ll be no throwing them around or ramming them into walls or other pallets. In conjunction with this, also be sure to set a limit on how much weight any one pallet should be allowed to handle. Also encouraging proper pallet stacking (both in the sense of placing goods and produce on the pallet and when stacking pallets on top of other pallets).

In the end, maintaining and protecting your pallets will come down to a level of commonsense. Ask yourself what would be most likely to cause pallet damage and then create appropriate measures that aim to reduce those causes.

At Cannon Logistics, we take every measure necessary to ensure our clients’ products and goods reach their destination on time and in perfect condition. If you’d like to find out more about our services, give us a call on (07) 3217 9211.