22 WESTERN PALLET
The Pallet Foundation Project Focus: The Pallet Design System™
Annette Ferri, NWPCA Vice President, Communications Communications
From their first use in the 1920s, wooden pallets have played a critical role in the world economy. Every day, there are an estimated two billion pallets in the United States alone, with 80 percent of all U.S. commerce carried on wooden pallets.
To better understand pallet design and its load, the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association (NWPCA) helped found the Pallet and Container Laboratory on Virginia Tech's campus in 1976.
In 1984, the Pallet Design System™ (PDS) Version 1.0 was released, and it was the culmination of reliability-based design and methodology created by researchers. Every year, each new version of PDS incorporates the latest data, engineering, and technologies, which result from NWPCA's ongoing commitment to research and development. Tens of millions of dollars have been expended on PDS, not only for software development but also in research toward increased understanding of the relationships between the design and performance of wood pallets and the entire unit load.
The NWPCA and the Pallet Foundation invest heavily to stay on top of relevant trends that advance safety in the supply chain and encourage the reuse and
conservation of materials. Packaging professionals can create and explore design options and get instant, accurate engineering analyses with the software.
"I think the greatest asset of PDS is our ability to use it internally, so from a quality standpoint we can put something in front of our builders and our workers, and they know exactly what we need, down to the number of nails, the types of nails we are using, the type of wood, the thickness of the wood," commented Steve Yelland, JFR Holdings.
WPA is proud to be a partner with The Pallet Foundation. WPA is represented on TPF board with 4 members and has contributed nearly $300,000 to the TPF from its annual auction. On January 17, 2021, at its annual meeting in Palm Springs, the auction will again be raising funds to benefit TPF and Nature’s Packaging.