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Ikea's Cardboard Pallets Intrigue

By Rain Noe - January 2, 2012

in Design Business | Sustainable Design

In just a few weeks, Ikea will enact a massive design change that will be largely invisible to consumers: They're ditching wooden shipping pallets in favor of cardboard ones. The furniture giant has designed a way to fold corrugated cardboard into a structure that is far thinner than a traditional wooden pallet, yet can still support the 1,650 pounds necessary to transport their goods. According to Bloomberg Businessweek,

One-third the height of wooden trays at 5 centimeters (2 inches) and 90 percent lighter at 2.5 kilos, they'll save thousands of truck trips and cut transport bills by 140 million euros ($193 million) a year at a cost of 90 million euros for paper purchases and new forklifts, Ikea says.

As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a success it's a good bet that other retail giants will take notice. But the thing that has analysts skeptical is that the pallets can only be used once. While they'll surely be recycled afterwards, perhaps on-site at each facility, this bucks the industry trend of "pooling," whereby used wooden pallets are collected by companies dedicated to the task who then redistribute them to other retailers, prolonging the pallets' lives. We're curious to see how the green balance shakes out on this one.

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Saul

12 years ago

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I currently work as a construction designer for a company that, among other thins, produces cardboard pallets. They do have problems, but getting wet is not the biggest one. Getting wet is easily predictable. Bad loading and packaging cause much more problems than water. Cardboard pallets can also be waterproofed with a number of treatments and laminates.

And as for being a design blog, cardboard pallets are much easier to customize for a specific use than wooden pallets.
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carlos

12 years ago

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i used to work in a packaging company as one of the R&D designers. we manufactured paper pallets. some made of corrugated cardboard and some made of honeycomb paper boards.
its actually very useful to people that import products, particularly in the food and beverage industry.
paper pallets are much lighter and can hold plenty of weight.
we usually custom designed each one to specific weight needs of the clients.
in a crush test of a 30 x 30 x 3cm sample of honeycomb paper board, it took 2.5 tons to break it
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bob

12 years ago

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Bacopa, what.!? You want a reality check? Come on... this is a DESIGN blog.
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Bacopa

12 years ago

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What if you unload a truck while the wind is blowing the rain? I've seen some amazingly strong cardboard structures that could hold surprising weights, but get them wet...

My current and previous job both involve moving heavy things on pallets. I'll need to see this to believe it.
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