01Where a load starts
A trailer arrives with 500-odd pallets, most of them stacked twenty high. It gets broken down onto the intake line, and from that point every pallet gets touched by a person. There is machinery in this business, but the sort call is human and I do not expect that to change soon.
The grader is making one of three decisions: this goes out as it is, this needs work, this is finished. Everything downstream depends on that call being right.
02The four-second sequence
- Stringer notches, both ends, both sides. The hand goes here first. A crack starting at a notch shoulder is the most common structural failure and the least visible.
- Lead boards. The outermost deck boards take the fork strikes. Cracked, missing or split lead board is the most common repair.
- Bottom deck. People forget to look. A missing bottom board makes a pallet unrackable and it is invisible from above.
- Fasteners. A hand run across the deck finds a protruding nail faster than an eye does. This is a safety check, not a quality one.
- Square. Not measured on the line — a grader develops an eye for it, and out-of-square pallets get pulled for a tape check.
- Contamination. Chemical staining, unidentified residue, embedded metal. These get pulled out entirely.
Four seconds, six checks. A good grader does this all day at around 700 to 900 pallets a shift and their accuracy does not drift much, which still surprises me after nineteen years.
03The repair bench
Roughly a third of intake comes off the line marked for repair. On the bench the work is fast and specific.
| Repair | Time | Effect on grade |
|---|---|---|
| Replace one lead board | ~35 sec | Still Grade A if under two total |
| Replace two deck boards | ~70 sec | Grade A limit reached |
| Fit a companion stringer | ~55 sec | Drops to Grade B |
| Plug a broken notch | ~40 sec | Grade A allows one |
| Re-nail a loose deck | ~25 sec | No grade effect |
| Fit a mend plate | ~30 sec | Drops to Grade B or below |
The economics are the best in the business: about three dollars of labour and material returning an asset worth eleven to sixteen. It is also the lowest-carbon way to put a pallet into a supply chain by an order of magnitude.
04Why a second grader
Every repaired pallet is re-graded before it goes to stock, and deliberately by someone other than the person who marked it for repair.
The reason is human, not technical. A grader who decided a pallet was worth repairing has made a small investment in that decision, and when they see it again after the bench they are inclined to agree with themselves. A second pair of eyes has no such attachment. It costs a few seconds per pallet and it is why our reject rate on repeat accounts sits under 0.4%.
“The exit check catches things the intake check let through, and the intake check catches things the exit check would never see. Neither one is redundant.”
05What gets pulled and why
- Branded pool pallets. Blue CHEP, red PECO, white iGPS. They belong to somebody else. We sort them out at no charge and arrange their return, and we do not buy them.
- Chemically contaminated wood. Anything with unidentified residue goes to controlled disposal, not into the fibre stream.
- Heavily metalled stock. Mend plates, banding, embedded fasteners beyond economic extraction.
- Painted and heavily branded pallets. Recoverable, but worth substantially less and sorted separately.
- Anything failing twice. A pallet that comes back to the repair bench a second time in one pass goes to the dismantler. There is no third look.
Our published grade criteria are on the grades page. If you are buying from anyone, ask them to write theirs down — the request itself tells you a lot.
