Pallet statistics are a bit hard to come by for Australia but the U.S. Forest Service has published statistics for the United States and you can assume that while the quantities are significantly lower the proportions are roughly the same. America has an estimated 1.9 billion pallets and to put that into perspective, think of it like this - 1.9 billion seconds is equal to a little over 60 years. A
merica produces 500 million new pallets each year and those 500 million pallets account for nearly 40% of all hardwood production in the US - the pallet industry is the second only to the construction industry as the biggest consumer of American hardwood. So, of those 1.9 billion pallets, 1.4 billion are being used to move stuff around, 175 million are repaired or recycled and 325 million are either incinerated, abandoned or sent to landfill - remember these are just the figures for the US, no-one seems to know how many there are worldwide but it all adds up to a staggering waste of natural resources even if the timber is, by and large, renewable. Pallet wood is almost always fugly until it's cut and sanded and turned into something else.
