The wooden pallet starts life as a tree; a pine tree or poplar from the hillsides of Sweden, an Oak from the forests of USA, a hardwood tree from the diminishing forests of many lands. Many pallets are made from soft wood and are considered expendable, but as the projects on this site will demonstrate, they can be a valuable and cheap source of timber for a variety of wood working projects.
Hardwood pallets are created from wood felled from around the world, often from countries where indigenous forest cover is diminishing at an unsustainable rate; the Philippines, Sri Lanka, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. These forests are valuable reserves of the world’s carbon and are vital to maintain the planet’s biodiversity. Many of these countries have already lost up to 80% of their natural forest cover and the destruction goes on.
Exporting goods around the world on pallets is big business and the timber used is a by product, often cast off in land fill sites or perilous piles waiting to be burnt. In the USA alone over one billion pallets circulate the country each year. 700 million are made each year with only about a half of these recycled.
Each year over a billion cubic metres of timber are harvested world wide. In the UK alone over 11 million square metres of timber are used in the building and packaging industries of which over two thirds is imported, mostly from Scandinavia and the Baltic States. The UK currently consumes over 3% of the world’s wood.
In landfill sites the biodegradation of wood releases green house gases, and although recent EU directives have been issued on the recycling and recovery of wood used in packaging, still a considerable amount can be seen stacked in large fire – risk piles on industrial sites awaiting disposal, often by burning. Some is sold for firewood, some burnt in storage depot's and some recycled back to the distributors.
But this timber could be put to a far better use. Instead of going to timber yards to buy new wood for wood work and building projects, a small amount of time reclaiming the wood from pallets can provide huge savings and the knowledge that the timber is being put to a far better use than ending up on a bonfire or chucked into landfill sites.
It’s far better for a pallet to end its days as something creative to enhance our homes and gardens rather than a pile of ashes.