Logistics
Backhaul pairing, and how we cut empty miles by 38%
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Every dispatcher knows about backhauls. Very few pallet customers know that mentioning they also generate cores can take a bite out of their freight line.
In 2019, 46% of our trailer miles were run empty. Last year it was 29%. Nothing about the fleet changed — what changed was that we started designing routes around the fact that most of our customers are both sources and destinations.
Why pallet freight is unusually pairable
A company that buys 400 pallets a month almost certainly also generates 300 cores a month. They are the same pallets, eighteen months apart. Yet in most supplier relationships those are two separate conversations, handled by two different people, on two different trailers.
| Measure | 2019 | Last year | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empty miles as % of total | 46% | 29% | −17 pts |
| Runs paired both directions | 22% | 71% | +49 pts |
| Average route miles per pallet moved | 0.41 | 0.26 | −37% |
| Diesel per 1,000 pallets moved | 18.4 gal | 12.1 gal | −34% |
| Front Range routes per week | 3 – 5 | 4 – 7 | More frequent, smaller |
What a paired run looks like
- 1
Load out
Trailer leaves 4890 Geneva St with 480 Grade A pallets for a food packer in Greeley.
- 2
Deliver
Unload at the dock. Roughly 45 minutes.
- 3
Reload on site
The same trailer takes 380 cores the same customer has accumulated since the last visit.
- 4
Second stop, if the geography allows
A brewery in Loveland on the return leg with 120 keg squares out and 90 cores back.
- 5
Return and weigh
Back to the yard loaded. The round trip carried freight in both directions.
That run is 148 miles. Done as two separate trips — one delivery, one collection — it would have been 296 miles with two empty legs. The customer pays one freight leg instead of two, and we burn half the diesel.
What stops it happening
- Nobody mentions it. The most common reason. A customer orders pallets and separately, months later, asks about disposal. They are never connected.
- Different people own the two sides. Procurement buys; facilities disposes. They do not talk, and neither knows the other is dealing with the same supplier.
- Timing mismatch. Cores accumulate on a different rhythm from consumption. A drop trailer solves this completely and almost nobody asks for one.
- Dock capacity. Loading out and back in the same visit needs a slot long enough. Usually it is there; sometimes it genuinely is not.
The carbon arithmetic, since people ask
A loaded 53' van on Front Range routes averages roughly 6.1 mpg in our fleet. Diesel emits about 10.2 kg CO₂ per gallon. The Greeley run above, paired rather than split, avoids 148 miles — about 24 gallons and 247 kg of CO₂, on one trip.
Across our routing, pairing removed an estimated 214 tonnes of CO₂ last year. That is netted against the avoided-manufacture figures in our{' '}carbon methodology rather than claimed separately, because claiming both would be double counting and somebody would eventually notice.
Why we serve a tight geography
Pairing only works with density. A yard chasing lanes nationwide cannot pair, because the chance that a delivery and a collection line up on the same corridor on the same day falls away fast with distance.
That is the actual reason we serve Denver, the Front Range and a handful of neighbouring states rather than advertising nationwide coverage. It is not modesty. It is the only way the routing maths works.