November/December 1998
Duraskid pallets—made of recycled plastic and recovered wood—are shaking up the wood pallet industry and creating new demand for previously discarded materials.
By Kent Kiser
Kent Kiser is editor of Scrap.
You’ve heard the saying about building a better mousetrap.
For Dura Products International Inc. (Etobicoke, Ontario), the goal has been to build a better pallet. That’s right, a better pallet, or skid as they’re called in industry—those ubiquitous workhorses of commerce that ease the handling, transport, and storage of products. Pallets move the world, as one industry saying puts it.
When most people think of pallets, they probably think of wood pallets, and for good reason given that an estimated 96 percent of all pallets were made of wood in 1997.
Dura Products International wants to change that.
To that end, it has developed the Duraskid, a super-strong pallet made of recycled plastic and recovered wood. This highly engineered product—manufactured by the firm’s Dura Skid Inc. division—is billed as “the first real, cost-effective alternative to wood and plastic pallets.” And the firm has lofty aspirations for its new pallet, namely to make Duraskid a brand name in the pallet industry and spread its production and use worldwide.
Pursuing Pallets
At this point, you might be wondering: Why pallets?
First, pallets are big business—an estimated $6 billion a year in the United States alone, say industry experts.
Second, the pallet industry is made up of many small businesses—some 3,793 companies in just the United States, according to the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association (NWPCA) (Arlington, Va.)—making it a potential candidate for consolidation and competition.
And third, wood pallets have come under attack on several fronts. For one, they consume about 7 percent of all wood fiber used in the United States annually and almost 40 percent of hardwood lumber (albeit the low-quality, “heart-of-the-log” lumber), says NWPCA. Currently, there are an estimated 1.5 billion to 2 billion wood pallets in use in the United States, with more than 400 million being added yearly, industry experts report.
Wood pallets also raise concerns about being potential bearers of contamination, disease, and insect infestation, which has caused their transport across international borders to be controlled or restricted, even banned in some instances.
The biggest controversy involving wood pallets, however, centers on their longevity and disposal. While wood pallets can be—and are—refurbished and reused, close to 200 million are disposed of annually, according to industry figures. But many landfills reportedly refuse to accept wood pallets.
While these controversies have been bad news for wood pallets, they have been good news for Dura Products International and its composite pallet, which was designed to be free of the problems of wood pallets.
In the beginning, Keith Carrigan, director of Dura Products International, knew he wanted to make a product—some product—out of a composite that included recycled plastic. He also knew he wanted to use a variety of plastics, including HDPE, LDPE, and PP. He faced two challenges, however. First, it’s difficult to make products out of recycled plastics because different resins have different melting indexes. To make a quality product, you need to have a consistent, uniform flow of material that is free of unmelted pieces. And second, plastic doesn’t have much structural strength by itself.
Some, but not all, of these problems were solved by mixing the plastic with recovered cellulose fiber, such as sawdust. “We wanted to take the good aspects of plastic and the good aspects of wood and throw out all the bad,” says Carrigan. “We wanted our product to be able to do at least what a good hardwood does—and that had never been done with recycled plastic, or any plastic for that matter.”
After creating a plastic-wood composite that had promising structural strength, Dura Products International had to select a product to make out of it. It chose pallets, which was both a good choice and a bad choice—good because of the great market potential, bad because “we didn’t realize just how complicated a piece of equipment the pallet is,” says Carrigan.
Though the humble pallet looks simple and low-tech, “it’s one of the most complicated pieces of equipment in the world, quite frankly,” he asserts. After all, pallets must be able to support heavy loads (both on the ground and when racked) and withstand wear-and-tear from forklifts, impact damage from being dropped, deterioration from ultraviolet rays, and more.
To build a better pallet, these forces and stresses had to be quantified, a new type of composite pallet had to be structurally engineered, and production equipment had to be designed to make the new pallets.
Dura Products International started out by purchasing an existing extrusion system that looked promising, only to find that it didn’t work. Carrigan then went to the firm’s vice president of engineering, Weining Song, and said, “I thought we’d be starting out with something, but it turns out we’ll be starting out with nothing. What do you think? Can we do it?” Song replied, “I have some ideas.”
The firm then began its research in earnest. It bought three different sizes of extrusion equipment—“We didn’t even know what equipment we needed,” says Carrigan—and used some equipment at the University of Toronto to refine its equipment needs. It also took advantage of the pallet laboratory at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Blacksburg, Va.) to conduct experiments and understand technical issues such as modulus of elasticity, impact strength, sheer strength, ultraviolet impact, and static load/dynamic load capacity.
In-house, the company tested its pallet designs using the same computer-aided design program—dubbed dynamic finite element analysis—used to design the Boeing 777. No wonder one of the company’s slogans for the Duraskid is “Engineered first … to last.”
In short, notes Carrigan, “we developed a science and a process that didn’t exist,” and it spent $6 million along the way.
The fruit of all this labor was the Duraskid, which commenced limited production in October 1996 and began 24-hour-a-day production in March 1997.
A Proprietary Process
Dura Products International’s headquarters sits on the outskirts of Toronto in the commercial suburb of Etobicoke. Even from the parking lot, you can smell the aroma of hardwood coming from the bags of sawdust inside the 67,000-square-foot facility.
The tidy production plant is dominated by 14 extrusion lines that churn out the stringers, decks, and bottom boards that make up a Duraskid pallet. The process starts, however, with the recycled plastic and recovered cellulose fiber that’s stored in gaylord boxes, large sacks, and sealed paper bags near the plant’s entrance. Currently, much of the company’s cellulose is sawdust from hardwood-floor makers. But the process can reportedly work just as well using other cellulose sources such as rice hulls, peanut shells, bamboo, and rough grasses.
In terms of plastic, the company uses what Carrigan calls “the full range”—HDPE, LDPE, and PP, 80 percent of which is postindustrial, 20 percent postconsumer. The company pays a small fee for the cellulose and plastic, saving the supplier disposal costs while giving Dura Skid the raw material it needs.
Carrigan also notes that Dura Skid can even use its own old pallets as a raw mate-rial. The firm gives its customers a 15-percent recycling credit toward the purchase of new one. Then it takes the old ones, grinds them up, and recycles the material into a new pallet.
In general, Duraskids are made out of a mixture of 40 to 50 percent plastic, 50 to 60 percent cellulose, and about 2 percent of a “special binding agent.” The process begins when the cellulose and plastic are fed pneumatically through long vacuum-cleaner-like tubes into separate hoppers for weighing. The material is then combined with the binding agent in a proprietary process that creates the raw material for making Duraskids. “Something happens molecularly to this product, and that’s all I’ll say,” Carrigan remarks.
The combined material emerges in clumps that are shredded into smaller clumps and loaded into gaylord containers. Full gaylords are moved to the head of each extrusion line. After being vacuum-fed into a hopper, the material is fed continuously into the extruder, in which it is softened at temperatures in excess of 180oC then pushed through a series of dies that shape it into the desired profile—a stringer, deck, or bottom board.
As the now-board-like product emerges from the dies, it enters a cooling tank, a long refrigerated trough in which an oil and water mixture is poured over it. It inches off the line with a smooth, almost marble-slick finish and is cut by an automated saw to the proper length.
Carrigan watches like a proud father as each new board tumbles off the line. He pulls one from the pile and points out the consistency of the material throughout. There are no unmelted pieces of plastic, no irregularities in color or texture. “You’ll notice that everything inside here is uniform,” he says. “You’ll never see this with any other recycled plastic product.”
Then, to illustrate the product’s strength, he takes a step back, bounces it off the plant’s concrete floor several times, then shows that there’s not a scratch on it. “It’s pretty structural stuff,” he boasts. “It has the strength of a good hardwood, and we can make it even stronger.” Plus, he adds, unlike wood, which is only strong against its grain, Dura Skid has taken the “orientation” out of its product, making it strong in every direction.
After tumbling off the extrusion lines, the Duraskid components head for the assembly area, which just went from being semi-automated—when it took three minutes to make one Duraskid—to completely automated, with assembly now cut to one minute. Here, in contrast to wood pallets, which are usually nailed together, Duraskids are assembled with special screws or bolts. Far from skimping in this area, the company conducted compression, sheer, and pull tests to make sure its fasteners would have sufficient strength to hold the pallet together through multiple stresses. As Carrigan states, “This product is fully engineered from top to bottom, not just in the material.”
After being assembled, many of the skids go through a shotblasting process to make their surface slip-resistant. The material is so strong that sandblasting isn’t strong enough, so the pallets are hung by hooks and carried by an overhead chain system through a steel shotblasting unit. Finished pallets are then stored in dizzying stacks in preparation for shipping. Dura Skid sells its pallets to more than 200 food and beverage companies, carmakers, local warehousers, and manufacturers. As it expands its production, the company expects to land larger customers who need reassurance that it can supply a large quantity of product.
Gaining Ground on Wood
No doubt about it, life’s been good so far for Dura Skid. “We’ve had tremendous demand for our pallets. We can’t produce enough,” says Carrigan, who directs the company with CEO Mike Zuk and Craig Prentice, president of Dura Skid Inc.
Currently, the 100-employee Etobicoke facility can produce 50,000 pallets a month. And this fall, Dura Skid opened its second plant in Andover, Mass., near Boston. This 133,000-square-foot facility, a joint venture with Environmental Composite Products L.L.C., operates under the name Dura Skid (New England) L.L.C. and will reach full production by the end of 1998, giving Dura Skid a grand production capacity around 1.2 million pallets a year.
But the company has big expansion plans in 1999 and beyond. First, it intends to double the Andover plant’s capacity to 1 million pallets a year, and its goal is to open two to three new plants a year for the next three years, giving it 10 to 15 plants in the United States and Canada by 2001. Hot target areas for its plants include California, Texas, Michigan, and Florida. “We’ll soon be in a position to put multiple plants up as quickly as we can get them up,” Carrigan says. Most of these new operations will be joint ventures like the Andover plant. As he explains, “We like to joint venture with local companies that know where and how to source the raw material to feed the plant.”
As its production grows, so will its sales, says Carrigan, from about $3 million this year to $11 million in 1999.
While North America is the key market for Dura Skid, from the start “we were looking at producing a product that we could take worldwide,” Carrigan says, noting that “every week we get contacted from all over the world about this product.” In particular, he points to “tremendous interest” from Mexico, Southeast Asia, South Africa, the Middle East, China, India, Scandinavia, and Western Europe, to name a few. Notably, the company expects its international ventures to be even more lucrative than its North American ones due to the higher lumber prices and generally higher cost of products overseas.
Dura Skid’s other ambitions include entering the pallet rental business—“We’re working on a strategy right now to enter that market,” Carrigan says. Also, the firm is registered for trading on the Canadian Dealing Network and the Level Three Bulletin Board, Nasdaq, with the goal of becoming fully traded on Nasdaq. And it will continue its quest to establish Duraskid as a brand name in the pallet industry.
In the future, the company will also likely branch out into other product lines, possibly soffits, fascia, door and window frames, decking, fencing, drying strips for lumber, containers for core samples in the mining industry, and more. “Other applications of the material are virtually limitless,” Carrigan says.
For now, though, Dura Skid’s focus is on pallets—specifically on promoting its “better” pallet around the world. “The wood pallet industry isn’t going to disappear overnight because there’s no one out there who can produce 400 million non-wood pallets a year,” Carrigan says. “But certainly, composites and other materials are gaining in popularity and are continuing to grow their share of the market.”
For Dura Skid, at least, that is certainly a palletable development. •
Editor’s note: For more information about Dura Products International or Dura Skid, call 416/679-0556 or visit www.duraproducts.com.
Duraskid pallets--made of recycled plastic and recovered wood--are shaking up the wood pallet industry and creating new demand for previously discarded materials.