2006-11-04 Pallets, by the thousands, pass through Dinwiddie (BY T. DEVON ROBINSON)

Pallets live a hard life

The rectangular wooden or plastic platforms, commonly seen in big-box retailers with the cargo still attached, are constantly flipped, pushed, ferried around on forklifts, placed in tractor trailers.
The Country Store of Virginia
“The pallets that are really bad get ground up for mulch and for fuel,” said Paul Johnson, plant manager of the Rehrig Penn Logistics LLC warehouse. The plastic pallets are sent to recycling plants.

The pallets that are still in good condition from, for example, Wal-Mart stores near the Tri-Cities and the Wal-Mart Distribution Plant in Dinwiddie, most likely end up at Rehrig Penn.

Rehrig Penn provides tracking, recovery, storage, repair, washing and disposal of returnable packaging items such as pallets, boxes and other containers.

Currently, about 40 workers work with about 20,000 pallets in nearly 100,000 square feet of the former Ingram Books building near the intersection of Boydton Plank and Simpson roads.

“And that really isn’t that many,” Johnson said. “We’ve got plenty of room to expand.”

Rehrig Penn, a subsidiary of the Rehrig Pacific Co., opened this location earlier in the year, making an estimated $750,000 investment in Dinwiddie County.

The company is also located in an Enterprise Zone, which also has additional infrastructure support.

Another draw to the Dinwiddie location was its proximity to the distribution center, one of its largest customers.

“That was a big factor in it but it was going to open in this general area,” Johnson said. “It’s a good area as far as an opportunity for a business like ours.”

Although Rehrig Penn deals primarily with Wal-Mart, Johnson said, it has the capacity to handle pallets from other retailers.

“We’d like to expand our business as well as extend our service to other people,” he said.

Currently, Rehrig Penn handles 60 to 100 trailers of containers a day.

“We get pallets from the distribution center and the Wal-Mart stores,” Johnson said. “Then we sort through them and ship off the good pallets to Wal-Mart.”

Most of the wooden pallets are sorted and stacked by a machine that can do 400 to 500 pallets an hour.

A human can do the same with the pallets, which weigh between 50 and 60 pounds, at a rate of about 100 per hour.

“It really makes an efficient operation,” Johnson said.

• T. DeVon Robinson may be reached at 722-5160.