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...

When simple automated guided vehicles (AGVs) having no random access load transfer mechanism are used for carrying multiple loads between workstations, the loads cannot be handled independently. This paper considers the case when loads are placed in 5at pallets and each new picked up pallet is loaded on the top of batch of pallets already carried by the AGV. To avoid use of excessive space and ...

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...

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...