The pallet dance

Pallets: An international conspiracy

Our major source of fruits and vegetables changed their location, and so I've had to pick the material up on pallets recently, and unpack it.  It's a bit more work for me, but what really adds to the workload is the pallets.  We gain 60 to 100 pallets a week.

We used to take them back to where we got them, but they decided that since some of them got dirty they didn't want any of them.  So now I'm stuck with hundreds of them; I asked what the source did with them, and it turns out he was selling them for $1 each.   That'd be great!

Well, it turns out that the pallet world is more complicated that I knew.  See the blue pallets?  That's one multinational company.  I can't sell those to any of the local pallet vendors.  The blue pallet guys have an 800 #, but they're on the east coast. 

The red pallet guys are another multinational company; they're also on the east coast, but they answer their phone.  "Hey, I have a bunch of red pallets.  Do you want them?  "  maybe, says the person.  "Well, look, I'll bring them to you if you'll reimburse me for the trip, otherwise I'm going to burn them as firewood or something.   You'd think that they'd make it easy to get these things back to them.  I have to make an appointment to return the blue pallets.  I'm not sure if the red pallets can be returned at all.  Can I charge the pallet companies rent for storing the darned things? 

So I got to thinking.  But first, how do you figure out if a pallet is safe to use? 

Maybe I should make a deck out of them? 

images courtesy of http://imgur.com/a/RwewV

Or maybe I should make a house?

picture from http://i-beamdesign.com/projects/refugee/refugee.html
 

Or a fence? 

picture courtesy of http://doublenickelfarm.blogspot.com/2009/11/pallet-projects.html
 

Or a coffee table? 
Or raised planting beds?
Or very nice pallet deck chairs?

The possibilities are endless.