The Secret History of Shipping Pallets

Pallets are great thing. I just wish they could be made to self-destruct, after use.

We pick up hundrers of discarded pallets every year, in my fair city. Many of those end up in land fills, unless they are a standard size and are reuseable.

Everything has its calorific value....

I prefer to let nature take its course.

Burning them would only add to my carbon footprint.

Not really. Wood as a fuel source is carbon neutral regardless of whether you burn it or it decomposes naturally.

Its sort of in the same lines as burning dead wood you would collect that fell off of trees in the forest. You are just speeding up the decomposition process and using that process energy for yourself opposed to just letting it dissipate on its own.

The end result is still basically zero gain zero loss carbon and energy wise.

GA+

ship it...

It's always a great idea to reuse pallets:

and

also,

They can be stylish too:

When I was in the Air Force years ago, my job was to repair F-15 avionics when they broke. Thing was, they never broke. The F-15's avionics were so reliable that I never once had to replace a bad unit in all my time there, and consequently there was little to do for most of us other than to sit around and play Pinochle, like a bunch of bored, olive-drab Maytag repairmen awaiting The Call That Never Came.

For my part I'm not too keen on card-playing, and so between college courses and drawing less-than-complimentary 'toons of my co-workers, I kept pretty busy and out of the way of the Folgers-swigging Pinochle Meisters. The lifestyle was sadly telling, however.

Most of the NCOs in my shop were grossly overweight - some bordering on morbidly obese - and they largely spent their days doing their time, waiting for retirement, ensconced in comfy, overstuffed chairs behind gray, nondescript desks, drinking crap coffee by the barrel and smoking so much that Philip Morris once considered opening a branch office down the hall. As if in half-hearted attempts to justify their rank, between hands they'd send us out on make-work chores; things like cleaning the coffee pots and ash trays - all of which we'd cleaned earlier that day to utter perfection - or sweeping floors which already sparkled so much you got a tan every time you walked across the shop. It was during one of these mindless interludes that I had my flash of 'toonish inspiration:

The Pallet People.

The Pallet People were retired NCOs who, like Dune's Baron Vladimir von Harkonnen, were so grossly overweight that they would have worn antigrav belts to just keep their ankles from collapsing should they ever manage to right themselves - except that antigrav belts hadn't been invented yet, and so they dwelt on fortified pallets instead and were carted about by enormous forklifts. The Pallet People. National Lampoon's Gahan Wilson would have been proud.

They were fun comix and lasted a couple of years, and were not the least bit complimentary toward their hapless victims. Sadly, I no longer have any specimens of my work to show - they're all stuck on friends' and relatives' refrigerator doors between here and Timbuktu; incentives to not eat that half-gallon of Bluebell ice cream wot beckons from within the freezer like some smooth Lucretia McEvil, bless her ice-cold praline-and-caramel heart.

"Just a little?"

"NO!!!" glares the corpulent visage of Sgt. K from the fridge door. "You wanna look like me?!"

Mission accomplished.

Pallets are becoming obsolete in favour of slip sheets. I am not advertising for anyone. The link below was the first to pop up when I did a search.

www.astronslipsheet.com/