SUSTAINABILITY
British Gypsum East Leake Pallet Loop
LOOPING ROUND FOR GREEN BENEFITS
A
fter almost three years of talking about its distinctive green coloured pallets, and the benefits a circular economy pallet reuse scheme
could bring to UK construction, The Pallet LOOP’s vision is becoming a reality. In early April, British Gypsum announced it will be transporting some of its products on LOOP’s pallets, which are designed to be collected and used again and again. To encourage pallet returns, The Pallet LOOP will pay up to £4 back to merchants (and other registered pallet recipients) for every green pallet they put back in the LOOP via its nationwide pallet collection service.
With green LOOP pallets due to hit merchant branches and distribution centres in the coming weeks, Paul Lewis, founder of The Pallet LOOP, says: “Months and months of talks with key industry players have brought us to the brink of a significant shift in how we transport building materials across the UK. For too long, our sector has been distributing, then largely discarding pallets – consuming vast amounts of timber, that could be better
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The arrival of LOOP pallets is set to deliver huge financial and sustainability benefits, as BMJ discovers.
Above: Paul Lewis, founder of The Pallet LOOP
repurposed elsewhere. Scratch the surface and the numbers are pretty damning. Every year, around 20 million pallets are manufactured for UK construction with estimates suggesting less than 10% are recovered and reused. This month, thanks to the
leadership of British Gypsum, we will start to shift the dial on those figures.”
“Over the next twelve months, we’ll be issuing more than a million green pallets to British Gypsum for the distribution of its bagged plaster and plasterboard products. At the opposite end of the supply chain, we’ll be working with merchants (and housebuilding companies and principal contractors) to pick up those pallets, inspect and repair them where necessary, and put them back in the LOOP – to move more materials.”
“For merchants, the enormity of this change cannot be underestimated, and we are grateful to British Gypsum for becoming the first adopter of our scheme. Merchants (and their customers) are on the frontline when it comes to dealing with pallet waste. Once building materials have been delivered to branches, they must work out how to get rid of any pallets that are not getting passed on to customers. They also need to find somewhere to store the pallets prior to disposal. Currently, neither of these tasks are particularly easy and can end up costing merchants money.” The Pallet LOOP is on a mission to fix these problems, using circular economics, and working in partnership with Scott Pallets (both companies are part of the BSW Group). Continuing, Lewis says: “Our approach is straightforward. For materials manufacturers, we’ve designed a range of pallets that are engineered to last and can make multiple
A supplement to builders merchants journal June 2024
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