Chemical industry

Our client is a globally specialised chemical company that produces a wide range of advanced materials and specialty chemicals and fibres that are found in products that people use every day.

The packaging on which the materials are transported is used up to the production area. As a result, the hygiene requirements are high, which resulted in having the wooden pallets replaced by plastic ones in recent years. Nowadays, all products from this customer are shipped worldwide on plastic CP pallets.

Until recently, only new plastic pallets were used to deliver the products. The reason for this was the high demands placed on the quality of the pallets. The costs for the purchase of new pallets did not outweigh the costs of any delay in production due to poor pallets. But increasing attention to sustainability and the high costs of purchasing new plastic pallets were important factors in reusing the pallets.

After getting acquainted with 2Return, the solution turned out to be Packaging Recovery: recovering these plastic pallets, not only in the Benelux, but throughout Europe, after which they can be reused after delivery to the factories.

After sending a notification to 2Return that the pallets are ready for collection, they are collected and taken to one of the 2Return depots. Our experienced hauliers pick up from all over Europe and are aware of the registration procedures and specific rules at chemical plants. At the 2Return depot, they are checked for damage and sorted on the basis of the instructions supplied by the customer. The approved pallets are stored at the depot until they are called for by one of the factories. The pallets that do not pass the inspection are recycled.

Each factory uses different pallets, both in size and in type. 2Return is able to store them separately and deliver them on demand and when necessary, the pallets are washed. Not all pallets are provided with the customer's logo, but as this is a requirement of the factories, our depot employees will provide the ones missing a logo with the required details.

The availability and the JIT (Just in Time) return of the pallets is of great importance in order to avoid disruption to the production processes. Therefore, our customer has access to the web portal at any time of the day to get an up-to-date insight into the available quantities and types of pallets. This way it becomes very easy to plan the delivery of pallets to the factories.

The costs of retrieving, sorting, washing and returning the pallets to the factories is much times lower than the costs of new ones. Moreover, less raw material is used to produce new pallets, saving our customer a lot of money.