20 WESTERN PALLET
have been bought. Recyclers are turning to combos, and recycled lumber for material supply.” Recyclers are putting in expensive machinery and processes to recover lumber from pallets.
He noted that nail supply continues to be a hardship for a lot of people, and he does not see the situation improving quickly. “There’s no knight in shining armor (who is) going to come and just change it all, overnight,” he said.
“Now, here's the good news,” he continued, saying that people were making more money, but had never had less fun. “That's pretty much what I've heard.”
Looking ahead to 2022, he wasn’t really sure what the year would hold.”But a lot of these trends,” he said, “a lot of these things we've seen, I don't know that a lot of it's going to change.”
Brindley also raised the issue of pallet standards for 48x40 pallets, and how the widespread growth of automation might be a driver for more uniform standards. He acknowledged that promoting standards for the whitewood pool - or perhaps a subset of it, is a controversial topic.
“There are some people in this room that are going to fight this as much as they can. There's other people that are going to love it. I think it may be coming regardless, and I could be dead wrong,” he said. “ I'm talking about automation
and other things driving a conversation where there is a very specialized standard that is controlled and monitored and some people are willing to pay.”
“Could I be wrong? I might be. But I'm wondering with these guys getting ready to spend millions and billions on automation warehousing technology, how that's gonna change everything.”
OSHA Update
With the shift to a Democratic federal administration, there have been changes in OSHA's direction. Adele Abrams, an attorney specializing in OSHA regulation, provided a sweeping and detailed overview of the OSHA changes poised to impact workplaces across the country.
“Right out of the gate, we had President Biden issue over 40 executive orders within the first couple of weeks” she remarked.
“One thing to consider on the enforcement side is that we just went through four years of relatively lax enforcement,” Abrams continued. “I handle OSHA cases for companies in all different industries. Even before COVID, things had gone pretty flat.”
Now, Abrams remarked, inspectors have been unleashed and she is seeing quarter-million-dollar OSHA cases she has not seen in over four years. Beyond that, OSHA has an approach called the
allows a company to be cited at the maximum of $145,000 per exposed worker.
Annual Meeting Speakers, Cont'd from Page 19