PP half pipes and raffia make for world's lightest pallet

Plastics have taken on wood in the pallet arena for many years now, with injection-molded and thermoformed variants perhaps most visible. Pallets incorporating expanded polystyrene have also made some inroads. Now it's the turn of an interesting combination of polypropylene raffia and formed sheet to take up the challenge.

The Pack Less pallet. Flimsy but up for a weight of four tonnes.

Originally developed in Brazil by Jose Roberto Durco of Pack Less Pallets (Sao Paulo), they have been in commercial use there since 2009 at resin and PET preform manufacturers, among others, but they are now to be manufactured in Singapore starting the fourth quarter of this year and marketed throughout Asia via a licensing agreement with Pallets Asia (Singapore), which held a launch event in Singapore on June 28.

Pack Less pallets, which incidentally allow you to pack more given their lower profile than wooden or conventional plastic pallets, comprise two PP "tunnels" formed from sheet made from a blend of homopolymer and copolymer that are joined by a PP raffia fabric. The tunnels allow lifting with a forklift. All up a single pallet weighs less than 3 kg versus 20 kg or more for wooden and plastic pallets, and it can be folded. Despite its "flimsy" nature, it can support a static weight of 4 tonnes.

A typical Pack Less pallet occupies 0.05 m³ compared with 0.2 m³ for a wooden pallet. This has implications not only in that more product can be shipped in a single container, but less cargo volume is needed to deliver and return pallets. "If a truck can carried 390 wooden pallets, it can carry 2,000 Pack Less pallets," says Wilson Tan, CEO of Pallets Asia.

Currently, the Pack Less pallet can be used in logistics for bulk bags, 25-kg bags, octabins, stretch hood rolls, and carton boxes, with the latter requiring use of a corrugated plastic sheet. Pallets Asia is working on a variant for drum logistics.

The current user base in Brazil includes resin supplier Braskem and Coca Cola bottler Vonpar, which was able to reduce the frequency of PET preform shipments to its factories by 10% through the switch. Discussions are also reportedly underway with a major U.S. retailer for adoption of the Pack Less solution. Cabot, Saint Gobain, and Chemson are also current users.

Pallets Asia's Tan says that on average, a Pack Less pallet lasts for 4.7 round trips, upon which is can be refurbished. In terms of pricing, an 1100 x 1300-mm Pack Less pallet is more than competitive with the $17.75 a budding end user who attended the launch event said he was paying for a similar sized wooden pallet. "And the beauty of the Pack Less concept is that pallet size can be tailored to the application at hand without incurring a significant cost," says Peter Schenk, a consultant for Pallet Asia. "Imagine if you wanted to change the size of an injection-molded pallet. You'd be looking at half a million!"

Customizable pallet sizes enable shipping containers to be packed to the rafters and in one case, when the end user implemented a bag design change in parallel, he was able to save 7% on film costs for the bags themselves.

Pack Less pallets can also be used on automatic bagging/palletizing lines from suppliers such as Möllers (Beckum, Germany). "Pack Less pallets are placed on existing wooden pallets that remain inside the line and optical readers are adjusted to compensate for the extra height," says Tan.

Pack Less inventor Durco who flew 16,000 km to be at the Singapore event attended by 130 potential users said that 250,000 Pack Less pallets had been delivered since 2009, in the process saving approximately 10,000 trees. "It takes around 21 years for a pine tree to mature, and just to produce seven wooden pallets," he notes.-mpweditorial@ubm.com