The most valuable hardwood trees – one that are straight, tall and have few knots –would be cut down anyway. Pallet wood is worth about one-tenth the value of high-quality veneer wood, Araman says. Now, it’s important to understand that the logging industry isn’t cutting down trees just to make pallets. In 2012 about 450 million pallets – each using about 15 board feet of lumber – were manufactured in the United States, says Philip Araman, a leading forest products researcher for the US Forest Service. According to Hardwood Market Reports, wooden pallets – along with wooden shipping containers – consume 44 percent of all the hardwood produced in the US annually, up from 35 percent 13 years ago. Photo by Toyota Material Handling EU, on FlickrĪ staggering quantity of timber is converted into pallets. Despite the best intentions – and possibly the worst negligence or deceit of companies– they are responsible for transporting invasive insects that are destroying entire tree species in North America, causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage to the environment. And once put into service, pallets and shipping containers can change the ecological balance of entire continents. For starters, there is the pallet’s incredible use of forest resources. Given the wood pallet’s universality, it shouldn’t be surprising that the pallet carries with it a significant environmental burden. Combined with a hydraulic forklift, the wood pallet is the essential platform for transporting goods from warehouses to store shelves. Yet the wood pallet is one of the workhorses of our global economy, a key part of the system that moves just about every product you touch. It is so plainly constructed – of raw wood and nails – that most people never give it a second glance. It is so ubiquitous that it’s all but invisible. Consider for a moment the humble wood pallet.

99 percent invisible