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Two Tips To Follow When Ordering Pallets for Your New Manufacturing Facility

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Here are two tips to follow when ordering pallets for your new manufacturing facility.

Measure the width of the aisles in your facility's storage area

Pallets come in several widths and lengths. Before ordering any for your facility, you should measure the width of the aisles in your facility's storage area (i.e. the area where you'll be keeping raw materials, packaging materials, finished products, etc.), where the pallets will be used to store items and where your indoor forklift operators will be driving around with the loaded pallets.

When you have taken these measurements, you should think about whether you may need more than one forklift driver to be able to travel down these aisles at once. If your facility is large and you'll have several forklift drivers, then they may need to regularly pass by each other whilst transporting loaded pallets along the aisles.

If this is the case, then you must ensure that the pallets you buy are not too wide, as this might result in forklift drivers who are travelling towards each other with loaded pallets being unable to get by one another without the edges of their pallets striking each other. In contrast, if your facility is small and you'll have one forklift operator, then you can safely order wider-than-average pallets that will hold lots of goods (as long as they're a suitable size for the type of indoor forklift your staff will be using).

Consider whether you need untreated or treated wood pallets

Most pallets are wooden. You should think about whether you'd prefer untreated or treated timber pallets for your facility. If you'll be stacking medication or food products on the pallets, you might be better off ordering ones made of untreated wood, as these will not have any chemical treatments that might affect the scent, taste or safety of your consumable goods.

However, if you'll be using the pallets to carry non-consumable goods outdoors on your premises (for example, if you'll be loading items from delivery trucks in your outdoor loading bay onto your forklifts) and it rains regularly where you're located, then treated timber pallets would probably be a better choice, as these won't deteriorate when occasionally rained on and you won't have to be concerned about them imparting any flavours or odours on the products you stack on top of them.

Treated timber pallets might also be suitable if you produce or utilise liquid products whose containers could easily leak (such as bottles of cleaning fluids or tubs of water-based paints), as the pallets should remain in good condition, even with occasional leakages of these products.


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