Why heat treatment is better than fumigation for pallets?
As a busy commercial city, heat-treated pallets in London are always in high demand. Following recent timber shortages, some companies may have been tempted to use alternative kinds of pallets, but there are several reasons why you shouldn’t.
There are many reasons why London enterprises should take great care to ensure the sterility of their packaging, especially if it is repeatedly reused like pallets. In the first place, you want to extend a pallet’s lifespan to minimize your shipping costs: if you don’t your competitiveness will take a nosedive. Secondly, you want to protect the commodity from the packaging because returns (or worse — contamination) is another sure-fire way to destroy your margin. For international traders, the third major concern is compliance: few things have more potential to damage business than a quarantined shipment.
The ISPM-15 safe packaging standards
The International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC) has produced a clear definition of packaging safety and quality based on careful research. Those definitions are published as the International Regulations on Phytosanitary Measures or “ISPM-15”. Most countries now expect wooden pallets and most other wood-based packaging materials (excluding paper but including dunnage, crates, reels, collars and bracing) to show conformity with those standards, although you should always check the precise requirements with the destination country and any transit countries. The standards ensure both construction quality and sterilization by either fumigation or heat treatment.
Why use heat-treated pallets in London if your business is local?
The aforementioned reasons make it sensible to purchase only pallets and other materials with an ISPM-15 mark — their basic design and build quality, their ability to resist bacterial, fungal, or insect infestations, and their compliance with international standards. Even if you feel you do not need all these features for your immediate purpose, the ISPM-15 mark ensures they can be used for other purposes in the future. For that reason, it also affects their potential resale value and your ability to make use of pallet pooling schemes.
For the same reasons, if you already use old, uncertified or repaired pallets, it could be worth getting them treated and given the mark of approval. Any pallet repair can invalidate an existing ISPM-15 approval in which case the treatment will likely need re-applying.
The benefits of heat treatments over fumigation
Pallet and packaging suppliers certified by the UKWPMMP (the UK Wood Packaging Material Marking Programme) can approve pallets to ISPM-15 standards by either fumigation or by heat treatments but there are very few circumstances in which fumigation is preferable. Nevertheless, many older pallets and some imported pallets are still fumigated. Fumigation is almost always performed using the pesticide methyl bromide (sometimes called bromo-methane) which is highly toxic and has to be performed in a sealed tent or container. Its sole advantage today is probably in circumstances when pallets or goods are already in transit, in which case it may be easier to set up a fumigation tent than a kiln. It is less desirable in almost all other respects due to the following reasons:
— Sustained heat banishes moisture from deep inside the timber and makes the surface harder to penetrate by later damp conditions.
— In the process, heat treatments reduce the weight of the pallet, saving on shipping costs.
— Heat-treated wood is entirely non-toxic and therefore safe for use with foodstuffs
— Conversely, fumigation can transfer an unpleasant chemical odour into the shipped items.
— Methyl bromide is, of course, hazardous, and hence poses a risk to those who must use it.
— Methyl bromide is detrimental to the environment by depleting the ozone layer and is also a greenhouse gas.
— For the above reasons, methyl bromide is now banned in many jurisdictions for use on pallets (including the US).
— Generally speaking, heat treatment is also cheaper, especially when producing pallets in larger quantities.
Before buying pallets
If you need heat-treated pallets in London, always ask the supplier about their age, source and compliance, but it is extremely important to check the pallets themselves as well. The official stamp resembles an ear of wheat and features various code letters that identify the therapy, nation, and treatment centre. A large “HT” stands for “heat-treated” while an “MB” denotes methyl bromide.
