The Pallet Design System (PDS) is a computer design program developed by Virginia Tech, the National Wooden Pallet & Container Association, and the U.S. Forest Service to quickly and accurately predict the performance of new wood pallets. PDS has been upgraded annually since its original version in 1984. All of the previous upgrades, however, have continued to improve the accuracy of new pallet...

In 2001, an estimated 433 million new wood pallets were manufactured in the United States, consuming an estimated 6.6 billion board feet (BBF) of hardwood and softwood lumber, cants, and parts (Bejune et al. 2002). Subsequently, another industry has emerged that specializes in the repair and remanufacture of wood pallets. This rise of the wood pallet repair and remanufacture industry is in larg...

Over 135 million wood pallets were repaired for reuse in 1995. One of the most commonly damaged components in a wood pallet is the notched stringer. Metal plates, half companion stringers, and full companion stringers are repair methods described in the U.S. industry standard published by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. This study evaluated the effect of these three stringer repai...

The pallet repair industry has been growing at significant rates in the United States. It has been estimated that therepair industryreceived 299 million pallets in 2001, and a majority went back into the marketplace as repaired or remanufactured pallets. Many question how well these pallets perform when compared to new pallets. The purpose of this research was to provide a benchmark for the rel...

Wood pallet recovery, repair, and recycling are sound environmental activities that can reduce both forest resource demands and waste in landfills. Our studies found that 6.16 million tons of wood pallets (or 223.6 million pallets) entered municipal solid waste (MSW) and construction and demolition (C&D) landfill facilities in 1995. At the same time, wood pallet recovery, repair, and recycling ...

Wooden pallets are the largest single use of sawn hardwood logs in the USA. Unfortunately, millions of wooden pallets are discarded annually due to damage or because their low cost makes them readily disposable. High quality wooden pallets, on the other hand, promote longevity and re-use. However, building durable pallets requires high quality pallet parts. Because manual grading and sorting of...

In 1998, Safeway milk plants began daily deliveries to most stores, doubling their delivery frequency. The new schedule increased the workloads for assembling orders at the milk plant by 20 percent because, under the new system, very few store orders called for full pallets of a single product, and store-specific mixed pallets were time consuming to assemble. To reduce the excess workload, we d...

We address the multi container loading problem of a company that has to serve its customers by first putting the products on pallets and then loading the pallets into trucks. We approach the problem by developing and solving integer linear models. To be useful in practice, our models consider three types of constraints: geometric constraints, so that pallets lie completely inside the trucks and...

Warehouses must maintain a number of spatial constraints concerning the safe handling of hazardous materials. In this paper, we address the problem of automated monitoring of spatial constraints as pallets are moved on forklifts by human operators. We propose using small, self-contained localizing sensor packages mounted on pallets. We consider two architectures: 1) a global architecture where ...

Test Methods A total of 1867 new, multiple-use and used (remanufactured and repaired) GMA pallets were randomly sampled from 20 different locations throughout the United States. The pallets were carefully inspected and then tested for strength and stiffness when in racks spanning the stringers (RAS) and spanning the deckboards (RAD). The test spans were 44and 36-inch respectively and a uniform-...