Can used pallets be used for export?

Why people think used pallets are banned

Two separate developments get merged. First, the requirement for treated and marked wood packaging on GB to EU movements meant a lot of anonymous yard stock became unusable for those journeys overnight — not because it was used, but because it was unmarked. Second, European packaging policy moved up the agenda, and customers started asking questions about packaging that suppliers had never been asked before. Neither of those is a ban on used pallets, and packaging policy is, if anything, in favour of reuse.

The conditions that actually matter

• A legible mark, where marking is required. Both marked faces readable without a torch and a guess.
• An honest mark. If the pallet has been repaired or rebuilt, the mark has to still be true of the packaging as a whole — see repaired and remanufactured pallets.
• Structural soundness. No broken blocks or bearers, no split boards in load-bearing positions, no protruding fixings.
• Cleanliness and dryness. Soil, residues, staining, mould and soaked timber all cause problems — hygiene problems for the goods, weight problems for the freight, and attention problems at inspection.
• Consistency across the batch. A grade that varies pallet to pallet is hard to load to and hard to describe to a customer.
• Whatever your customer has specified. Plenty of receiving sites require new pallets contractually. That is binding whether or not the law requires it.

The real obstacle: evidence

When an EU customer asks what the packaging is, where it came from and whether it is reusable, a new pallet from a known specification answers easily. Anonymous used stock pulled from a yard answers badly — not because it is non-compliant but because nobody can say much about it with confidence. The cost of used pallets is lower and the cost of answering questions about them is higher. For a one-off shipment that trade-off usually favours used. For a regular programme into a demanding customer, it often does not.

A workable approach

1. Decide whether marking is required for the destination and material.
2. Inspect a real sample of the actual batch, not a stock photograph.
3. Photograph the marks on the pallets you ship, and keep the photographs.
4. Check whether the customer specification rules used stock out before you price the job.
5. Where you cannot say enough about the pallets to answer your customer, buy pallets you can.

Our used export pallets page covers the commercial side, and used export pallets in the range covers what we can supply. If you are unsure, send photographs of what you have — it is the quickest way to a useful answer.