Pallet pooling is renting, not buying. A pooling company owns a large fleet of standard pallets and rents them to manufacturers, who ship goods on them. The pallets move through the supply chain on the pool's books, and the pool collects the empties, inspects and repairs them, and sends them out again.
Who are the pools?
In North America the largest is CHEP, whose pallets are painted blue. PECO Pallet runs a red-painted pool, and iGPS a pool of plastic pallets. In Europe, LPR (La Palette Rouge) runs a red pool. Each has its own markings, its own customers and its own collection channels, listed in our return-channel directory.
How does a pooled pallet travel?
- The pool delivers pallets to a manufacturer's plant.
- The manufacturer loads goods and ships them to a retailer's distribution center or store, and reports the move.
- The receiver unloads the goods. Large receivers return the empties to the pool in bulk; the pool picks them up or they're dropped at a pool service center.
- The pool inspects, repairs and redistributes the pallets.
Who pays?
The manufacturer, through rental and handling fees, for as long as the pallet is on its account. Once a pallet moves on to a receiver, the arrangements depend on the pool's agreements with its customers. None of it involves the pallet being sold.
Why do strays happen?
The loop works best for big retailers with regular collections. Pallets that reach smaller businesses (an independent shop, a restaurant, a small manufacturer that received materials) fall outside the routine collections and pile up. Some get sold on by mistake, or end up in a recycler's yard. Pools spend real money recovering them, which is why they mark their pallets so clearly and publish collection request pages.
Why pooling at all?
Shared, standard, repaired pallets mean fewer new pallets built, consistent quality for automated warehouses, and no need for each manufacturer to recover its own. Those advantages only hold if the pallets come back, which is why the right move with a stray is to send it home.
Where we fit
We don't run a pool and aren't affiliated with any. We work with the other kind of pallet, the white-wood pallets businesses own outright: buying the reusable ones, recycling the broken ones, and sorting mixed piles so the pooled pallets go back to their owners.