SIC 2448 Wood Pallets and Skids

Contenidos

• NAICS CODE(S).
• FURTHER READING.

SIC 2448

This classification covers establishments primarily engaged in manufacturing wood or wood and metal combination pallets and skids.

NAICS CODE(S)

321920

Wood Container and Pallet Manufacturing

The manufacture of wood pallets and skids is the largest segment of the wood container industry. Pallets are made of platforms that are specially designed to allow heavy crates and boxes to be easily moved by forklift. Pallets play an important role in the shipping, handling, and storage of a huge variety of materials in an equally vast array of industries.

Hardwood lumber, such as oak, was used for 67 percent of the wood in pallets at the turn of the twenty-first century. Manufacturers used a total of 4.41 billion board feet of hardwood lumber for pallets. Other wood materials used included stumpage, logs, and cants. Waste materials were sometimes used by pallet manufacturers to make fuel wood, bedding, pulp, or charcoal, among other products.

The biggest pallet users are the food, steel and metal, paper and printing, and chemical industries. The most common pallet produced is the flushed stringer, double-face, nonreversible type measuring 48 by 40 inches, which is most often used by supermarkets. Since the 1980s, technology has played an increasingly important role in the pallet and skid industry, contributing to both production and design improvements. Most pallet manufacturers still used hand-held nailers and semi-automated equipment in 1980. By the 1990s, however, fully automated assembly systems allowed two laborers to put together 1,200 pallets in a day, at least four times the rate of production that hand nailers allowed.

Industry leader Pal Ex Inc. of Houston, Texas, which generated 1998 sales of just under $320 million (up 43 percent from 1997), merged in 1999 with Munich, Germany-based International Food Container Organization (IFCO). Pal Ex manufactured, recycled, and rented wooden pallets from its 71 facilities in 23 states and seven Canadian provinces, while IFCO supplied 50 million collapsible, reusable plastic produce containers to 15,000 supermarkets in 15 European countries. The combined company, named IFCO Systems, allowed Pal Ex to expand its pallet business into Europe and IFCO to expand its plastic container business into North America, setting the foundation for the combined firm to expand into Latin America and Asia. By 2004 the former Pal Ex business was operating as IFCO...