Ikea Scraps Wood Pallets for Paper

December 1, 2011

Ikea – which uses 10 million pallets to ship products from suppliers to 287 stores worldwide -- says it is replacing wooden pallets with a paper cardboard variation that is lighter and cheaper.

Ikea store image By January, the Swedish retailer will get rid of all wooden pallets in lieu of new corrugated pallets that can handle loads of 1,650 pounds, the same as wood, Jeanette Skjelmose, sustainability chief at Ikea’s supply-chain unit, told Bloomberg. “We don’t know if the paper pallet will be the ultimate solution, but it’s better than wood,” she added.

The big difference is that the corrugated pallets are two inches high, one-third the height of wooden pallets and are 90 percent lighter than wood pallets and weigh only 5.5 pounds. While wooden pallets can be used repeatedly, the paper pallets will be used only once and then recycled, according to the report.

From a cost perspective, Ikea said it will save $193 million a year, but will have to invest $66.7 million on the new paper pallets and forklifts to handle the new pallets. “We hope this will be a start in making transportation systems smarter and freight as compact as possible,” Skjelmose said, noting that the new pallets are as strong as wooden pallets if they are loaded properly,

In other Ikea news, the company plugged in three more electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at a store in San Diego, making this the third store in the chain with EV chargers in partnership with ECOtality Inc.

ECOtality is the project manager of The EV Project, a public-private partnership funded in part by a federal stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) to provide the necessary infrastructure to support the deployment of EVs.

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Keywords: electric vehicle charging stations, transportation efficiency

Comments (1) - Post a Comment

Woow? Our company was using a pallet when we have a shipping cargo's, Do you think your pallet was prepare for our products?

Edwardq at 1:01am EDT - May 2, 2012

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