The Reclaim Journal
32 long-form articles written by the people who grade, repair, treat and haul the wood — not by a marketing department. Everything here is what we would tell you on a site visit, including the parts that cost us the sale.
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Latest
Anniversary posts usually list achievements. This one lists mistakes, because those are the only part of sixteen years that is actually useful to anybody else.
9 articles
When lumber spikes, both new and recycled pallets get more expensive — at different speeds and for different reasons. The gap between them is where buying decisions live.
There is no such thing as an FDA-certified pallet. What exists is your documented control, and an auditor is testing whether you have one.
The strength argument is real and it is not the important one. What decides block versus stringer over a fleet's life is what happens when something breaks.
Forty thousand pallets across six weeks is not a larger version of eight hundred a week. It is a different problem, and it has to be solved in February.
It is a wooden frame with four hinges. It is also, for a lot of closed loops, the cheapest packaging decision available and almost nobody considers it.
Start with the box you are paying for, not the pallet somebody else standardised for a different vehicle in 1968.
The pallets were compliant. The crate was compliant. The two lengths of untreated 2x4 wedged against the load were not, and they were the first thing the inspector saw.
Most pallet carbon claims are directionally right and quantitatively invented. Here are the factors we use, where they come from, and the uncertainty attached to each.
There was a real argument internally about this. Publishing a number means you have to hit it every time, including on the Friday when the load has to go.
12 articles
It requires nobody's permission, no software and no capital. It usually produces the largest single saving available to the operation, and it is almost never done.
The species of a recycled pallet is decided by whatever sawmill was nearest when it was built, sometimes a decade ago and four hundred miles away.
The mark on the wood is the declaration. The record behind it is the evidence. Most of the time nobody asks for the second one, and then somebody does.
The cheapest mile in trucking is the one that was going to be driven anyway. Most pallet buyers are sitting next to one and have never mentioned it.
This is the most common serious warehouse hazard I see, it costs nothing to fix, and almost nobody has been told about it.
Any number you cannot interrogate is a marketing claim. Here is exactly how ours is built, including the part that does not flatter us.
The spreadsheet says 80 trips. The operation delivers 42. That single variable is the difference between a good decision and a hundred thousand dollars of moulded polyethylene in somebody else's yard.
The strongest part of a corrugated box is its corners. Overhang is the practice of asking those corners to hold up the box while standing on nothing.
Ninety seconds of my time is worth more than any other ninety seconds in this building, and it is not close.
MB is still a valid treatment code under ISPM-15. That is not the same as it being a good idea, and the gap between those two facts is where shipments get held.
Four seconds to sort, ninety seconds to repair, four seconds to check. Here is what happens in each of them, and why the last four seconds are the most important.
A food distributor raised their price per pallet by 23% and cut their annual pallet spend by 34%. Both numbers are true, and only one of them is worth reporting.
10 articles
A stack of empty pallets burns very differently from the same wood laid flat. Most operations know this vaguely. Fewer know what their own policy says about it.
Every November a customer asks why the price moved. The answer is the same every year and it is not complicated — but it is worth understanding, because you can buy around it.
The pallet that won North America because it fits a trailer is the wrong pallet for a box that is five and a half inches narrower.
I have watched this argument run for an hour in a conference room when it could have been settled in ten seconds on the warehouse floor.
Mould on a pallet is almost never a structural problem and almost always an audit problem. The fix is moisture, and moisture is a storage question as much as a supply one.
The mark has four required elements. I have seen shipments held because one of them was missing and nobody at either end knew what they were looking at.
None of these are exotic. All five turn up in ordinary purchase orders every week, and each one costs multiples of whatever the pallet saved.
Most people who sell us pallets have never seen what happens next. It is a five-tier hierarchy, and about 41% of everything we collect never needs a repair at all.
A 53-foot trailer costs what it costs whether you put 380 pallets on it or 540. Most buyers negotiate the unit price and never look at the number that actually moves.
Two truckloads of Grade A 48x40 from two suppliers can look like different products. Neither yard is being dishonest. The problem is that nobody outside your purchase order defines the word.
Who writes here
Editorial position
Several of these articles argue against buying from us. That is deliberate. A supplier who only publishes reasons to buy is publishing advertising, and it is worth exactly what it costs to read.
Dana Whitfield
Operations Director
9 articles
Marcus Ellery
Yard & Grading Lead
6 articles
Priya Raghunathan
Compliance Manager
5 articles
Tom Okafor
Fleet & Logistics Manager
4 articles
Lena Brandt
Sustainability Analyst
4 articles
Ray Castellanos
Repair Shop Foreman
4 articles
How the journal works
No email capture, no download form, no lead magnet. If it is useful, it is on the page.
Every figure quoted has a page behind it explaining where it came from and how confident we are. Ranges rather than false precision.
The 8% we do not divert. The two years we spent on machine grading. The year chasing tonnage nearly ended the business.
Six named contributors with a job title that involves pallets. No ghostwriting, no agency.
If something here is wrong, tell us and it gets fixed rather than quietly deleted.
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