With the right maintenance and attention, wooden pallets can be used around 10 times before they must be thrown away; recycling is the preferred option. Fortunately, when it’s time to stop using your Recycled Wooden Pallets, recycling them is a very straightforward and effective process.
Wooden pallets can be recycled without much difficulty, and numerous companies around the world choose to recycle their old wooden pallets to gain various benefits for the environment. Specialized centers exist that concentrate solely on reusing and recycling these pallets, ensuring the procedure is straightforward and effective for everyone participating.
Should you think about recycling the wooden pallets that you have, I can tell you the main advantages of this and explain how the process of recycling these pallets goes.
Benefits of Recycling Wooden Pallets
Recycled wooden pallets have a lot of benefits. Some of them are explained below:
Environment Betterment
Many people think that nearly 2 million pallets are being used every day just in the U.S. Over 90% of these pallets are made from wood, and all wooden pallets can be recycled completely. When you recycle wooden pallets by putting them back into use or disposing of them correctly when they can no longer be used, you are trying to:
- Reduce deforestation.
- Reduce waste disposal.
- Reduce landfill contributions.
- Reduce soil erosion.
- Provide an overall cleaner environment.
The advantages of using recycled wooden pallets for the environment are clear. They help preserve trees that would otherwise be cut down to make new pallets; they reduce the energy needed to produce these pallets; and they decrease the number of pallets that take up space in landfills. However, it might not be immediately apparent just how significant this effect is.
One calculation suggests that if we recycle 350 million pallets every year, it can result in saving around 43 million trees. According to the U.S. Forest Service, during the year 2011, about 474 million wooden pallets were taken back for reuse, and from those, approximately 326 million went back into use as pallets, while roughly another 148 million got recycled into different products. Additionally, research done by Virginia Tech University pointed out that among the total number of wood pallets that are made or repaired in America—700 million—a very small portion—less than three percent—ends up being thrown away in landfills. When you recycle wooden pallets, they don’t end up in landfills. Since a lot of landfill in the USA consists of wood, if you cut down on this even by a small bit, it’s better for the environment over time.
Additionally, they can have a second life when pallets are no longer usable and leave the cycle. The wood from these pallets might be processed into biomass energy, ground covering for gardens, bedding for animals pressed wood panels, and various other secondary products.
Safeguarding Ecosystem
With recycled wooden pallets the need for cutting trees goes down because the reused wood stays in use. This helps natural forests a lot by reducing pressure on them and aids in safeguarding fragile ecosystems that face risks now.
Crafting Furniture
The energy required to recycle wood is much lower than that needed to produce new pallets from raw materials. By recycling the wooden pallets you can reduce energy consumption and lower the associated carbon emissions. This also makes the wooden pallet cheaper.
Affordable wooden pallets are used to craft special furniture items – When wooden pallets are taken apart and dismantled, they can be turned into do-it-yourself, rugged-looking furniture for inside or outside the house. You might think about making shelves or places to keep things, tables for indoor use or the garden, or practical things such as pathways in a garden area or barriers.
Safety of Workers
Promoting healthy and safe ways of working – because recycling industrial wooden pallets is an easy and effective task, it helps to motivate your company’s workers to recycle any damaged or nearly broken wooden pallets. This can help avoid bad cuts, different kinds of injuries, or big dangers like fires in the building. If you monitor all the wooden pallets that your business uses regularly, this will make sure that those not fit for use are recycled and taken out of circulation so they do not pose a danger to other workers.
How do wooden pallets get recycled?
Wood pallets often get recycled at a factory for processing. If they come to the factory in good shape, workers sort out and recycle the pallets based on how good they still are, how much they’ve been used, and what value they might have. Wood pallets can mostly be taken apart and reused for garden mulch, compost, bedding for animals, or just as small pieces of scrap wood.
When you decide to transform your wooden pallets into furniture, take special caution while removing the boards because there might be termites or sharp wood that can injure you. Also, it’s wise to look up information before beginning do-it-yourself projects with wooden pallets. Guides on the internet for making furniture by starting from nothing can assist you in preventing the waste of wood that might happen if you do it without planning.
Conclusion
Recycled wooden pallets become part of a properly handled return and distribution system and provide an eco-friendly method for transporting many kinds of goods securely. Yet this does not mean the system has no flaws; wooden pallets still consume a lot of raw materials and contribute to carbon emissions.
Because of these points, it is very good to use those pallets that are not recycled. This helps them avoid becoming waste in landfills and supports the continuous use cycle of important delivery items.
