Wood Pallets and Your Carbon Footprint
A "Carbon Footprint" is a measure of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with a wide variety of activities and products. The main reason to calculate the carbon footprint of your supply chain is to lower the amount of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere.
Wood Pallets and Carbon Emissions
Wood pallets represent a significant part of the supply chain for many manufacturers, and managing the carbon emissions associated with their pallets is an important opportunity to mitigate climate change.
Wood products from sustainable forests have a negative carbon footprint. In other words, wood products store carbon. Even if the wood is cut down but not destroyed, the carbon that was fixed by photosynthesis acts as a long-term carbon store. A negative carbon footprint is ideal for your supply chain. The emissions associated with harvesting, transporting, and processing of the wood products are small compared with the total amount of carbon stored in the wood itself.
How Trees Store Carbon
As a tree grows it will "fix" the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and store it as carbon within the tree itself. When a tree decays and dies it releases carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. A tree performs carbon storage for human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. Over the last two hundred years, about two thirds of all human induced carbon emissions have come from the burning of fossil fuels and another one third of the emissions have come from changes in land usage such as agricultural expansion and deforestation.
Deforestation in the United States
In the United States, deforestation is caused by urban sprawl, the growth of agriculture, timber harvest, diseases, and fires. Before the mid-20th century, the United States went through a period of intense deforestation, but since then the size of U.S. forested areas has been relatively stable. Deforestation is offset by reforestation through planting projects and natural regeneration.
The Scale of Pallet Production
In 2018, approximately 450 million shipping pallets were produced in the United States, and 1.9 billion were in circulation. To construct these pallets, about 100 million cubic meters of softwood lumber and 4.3 million cubic meters of hardwood lumber were consumed. Typically, between 30% to 40% of the annual U.S. hardwood lumber production is used to make crates & pallets.
450M
Shipping pallets produced in the U.S. in 2018
1.9B
Pallets in circulation
100M m³
Softwood lumber consumed
30-40%
U.S. hardwood lumber used for crates & pallets
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