History of the pallet: from skids to pooled block pallets

The pallet is a 20th century invention built on a much older idea. People have moved goods on wooden skids and sledges for thousands of years. What changed in the 1920s and 1930s was the lift truck. Once a machine could slide under a platform and lift it, the platform became a standard piece of equipment, and the modern pallet followed. This page gives the key dates and why each one still matters to how pallets are designed and bought.

#Timeline of the pallet

#Before the pallet: skids

A skid is a platform on runners with no bottom deck. Skids could be dragged, rolled on logs, or lifted by early platform trucks. They are still used today for machinery, crate bases and heavy one-off loads. The difference between a skid and a pallet, a bottom deck, came from the need to stack loads and to run a pallet jack underneath. The pallet vs skid comparison covers that today.

#The forklift and the first pallets (1920s to 1930s)

Lift trucks that could raise a load were in industrial use by the 1910s and 1920s. The platforms they lifted were the first pallets. Hallowell's 1924 patent describes such a platform.

In 1937, George G. Raymond and William C. House filed a patent for a pallet designed to work with a new hand-operated pallet jack. It was granted in 1939 as US Patent 2,178,646. The double-deck, open-ended design allowed the jack's forks and wheels to enter, lift and move the pallet. That combination, a standard platform plus a standard lifting tool, is the idea behind every pallet built since.

Carl Clark patented a pallet with steel stringers in 1939, an early example of non-wood pallet construction.

#World War II: pallets at scale

World War II turned pallets from a factory convenience into a logistics system. Military supply depots, ports and ships needed to move enormous volumes quickly with limited labor. Palletized loads could be moved by one forklift driver in minutes. After the war, industry kept the practice, and the forklift and pallet became normal equipment in warehouses and distribution.

Robert Braun's 1945 patent for a four-way pallet and Norman Cahners' 1949 patent for a disposable pallet show the two directions designs went next: better entry for handling, and cheaper one-way pallets for shipping.

#Pooling: CHEP and the shared pallet (1946 onward)

When the US military left Australia after the war, it left behind large quantities of handling equipment, including tens of thousands of wooden pallets. The Australian government used them to form the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool (CHEP) in 1946, generally described as the first formal pallet pool. Brambles bought CHEP in 1958 and expanded it internationally. CHEP USA launched in 1990.

Pooling changed the economics of pallets: the user rents a high-quality block pallet for each trip instead of buying and managing its own. PECO (1997) and iGPS (2006, plastic) followed in North America. See pallet pooling and CHEP pallets.

#Standard sizes: GMA and EUR

As pallets spread, incompatible sizes became a cost. Two footprints came to dominate:

• 48 × 40 in (North America). The US grocery industry adopted 48 × 40 in as its common pallet, which became known as the GMA pallet. It fits two across a US trailer with the 40 in side leading. See GMA pallet.
• 1200 × 800 mm (Europe). In 1961 the European railways, through the UIC, standardized an exchangeable pallet for rail freight. That became the EUR pallet, and in 1991 EPAL was founded to license manufacturers and control quality. See EUR pallet.

ISO 6780 later listed six footprints for intercontinental use, including both.

#Engineering the pallet: Virginia Tech and PDS

For most of the century, pallets were designed by experience. That changed in the late 1970s and 1980s. The wood pallet association helped found a pallet research lab at Virginia Tech in 1976, and a joint program with the USDA Forest Products Laboratory developed methods to predict pallet strength. The result, the Pallet Design System (PDS), was released in 1984. Its lumber strength data, fastener models and later finite element analysis are still how many North American manufacturers rate pallet designs. PDS is now a Woodpack Global product.

#ISPM 15: pallets and invasive pests

Wood packaging can carry insects such as wood-boring beetles across borders. In 2002 the International Plant Protection Convention adopted ISPM 15, which requires solid wood packaging in international trade to be debarked, treated (usually heat treated to 56 °C at the core for 30 minutes) and marked. Enforcement phased in country by country. Every export pallet today carries the IPPC mark. See heat-treated pallets.

#Materials beyond wood

Wood has been the default pallet material from the start because it is cheap, strong for its weight, easy to cut and nail, and repairable. Other materials took specific niches as their advantages became worth paying for:

Each of these still competes with wood on cost per trip, and wood remains the large majority of pallets in use.

#Pallets today

The United States alone is estimated to have around 2 billion pallets in use, most of them wood. New pallet production was about 513 million units in 2016 according to a US Forest Service survey, with 48 × 40 the most common size. Plastic, presswood, metal and paper pallets have grown in specific niches, and automation has raised the bar on pallet flatness and consistency. See pallets for automation.

#Why the history still matters

• Dimension order (length along the stringers) comes from stringer pallet construction.
• Two-way vs four-way entry comes from the jack and forklift designs of the 1930s and 1940s.
• Block vs stringer reflects the split between pooled, multi-trip pallets and low-cost, owned pallets.
• Heat treatment marks on export pallets come from ISPM 15.

The designer supports all of these conventions. You can start from the 48 × 40 template or the EUR pallet template.