Before the pallet, loading a single cargo ship took weeks. Longshoremen would carry individual boxes, barrels, and crates aboard by hand, stacking them in the hold piece by piece. It was backbreaking, dangerous work that severely limited the speed and scale of global trade.
The pallet's origins trace to the early 1920s, when the first crude "skids" — simple platforms with runners — appeared in factories. But it was World War II that truly launched the pallet revolution. The US military needed to move unprecedented quantities of supplies across oceans and continents, and the traditional methods were far too slow.
In 1943, the US Navy adopted the 48" × 48" pallet as its standard, and the Army soon followed. Forklifts — another wartime innovation — could now load and unload ships in hours instead of weeks. A single forklift operator could move more cargo in an hour than a dozen longshoremen could in a day.
After the war, returning soldiers brought pallet and forklift skills into the civilian workforce. Factories, warehouses, and retailers quickly adopted the technology. The Grocery Manufacturers Association standardized the 48" × 40" pallet in 1958, creating the foundation for the modern North American supply chain.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of pallet pooling companies like CHEP (founded 1946 in Australia, expanded to the US in 1990) and the development of automated handling systems that relied on consistent pallet dimensions.
The environmental movement of the 1990s and 2000s brought new attention to pallet waste. Millions of pallets were ending up in landfills annually, and the industry responded with recycling programs, repair operations, and the circular economy model that we champion today.
Today, there are an estimated 2 billion pallets in circulation in the United States alone. They move approximately 80% of all US commerce. The humble wooden pallet — a technology barely a century old — has become one of the most important objects in the global economy.
And yet, the pallet continues to evolve. New materials (plastic, composite, metal), new tracking technologies (RFID, IoT), and new sustainability practices are shaping the next chapter of the pallet's remarkable story.