Standards & compliance
Why we don't buy blue pallets
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About once a month somebody offers us a stack of blue pallets, usually in good faith. The answer is always no, and the reason is worth spelling out.
A pooled pallet is rented, not sold. CHEP, PECO, LPR and the smaller regional pools retain ownership of every unit for its entire life. The company that shipped goods on it paid for the use of it; the company that received it never owned it at any point.
Identifying them
| Pool | Colour | Construction | Marking |
|---|---|---|---|
| CHEP | Blue blocks and boards | Block, full 4-way | CHEP branding, moulded and painted |
| PECO | Brown / red-brown | Stringer, painted ends | PECO stencil |
| LPR | Red | Block | LPR branding |
| iGPS | Black plastic | Plastic, full 4-way | Moulded iGPS marking |
| Regional pools | Various painted ends | Mixed | Painted stringer ends are the tell |
The heuristic that almost never fails: painted blocks or painted stringer ends mean somebody owns it. Nobody paints a pallet they intend to sell. Paint is an asset tag.
What happens if you sell them
In the best case, the buyer is a legitimate recycler who spots them, sorts them out and returns them to the pool — which is what we do. In the worse case, a less careful operator grinds them, and the pool operator eventually notices a pattern of losses traceable to your site.
Pool operators do pursue this. They employ recovery teams, they audit recyclers, and they have taken action against yards. We have no interest in being on that list, and we have no interest in a customer relationship that starts with us buying something they could not sell us.
What to do instead
- Sort them out. One pile, separate from your sellable stock. Ten minutes.
- Call the pool. All the major operators run free collection for accumulated units. CHEP and PECO both have straightforward online request processes.
- Ask us to help. On any buyback of size we will sort the pool pallets out of your stack and coordinate the collection at no charge. It costs us an hour and it is simply the right thing to do.
- Fix it upstream. If a specific supplier is sending you pooled pallets you have no way to return, that is a conversation to have with them.
Why we make a point of it
Partly ethics, and I will not pretend otherwise. But mostly because the recycled pallet industry has a reputation problem that it partly earned, and the fastest way to fix a reputation problem is for the people in the industry to be obviously, boringly straight about the easy cases.
Refusing blue pallets is an easy case. If a yard will not get that one right, you should wonder what they do with the hard ones.