Pick up your pallet and go home

           My household goods finally arrived in Sydney after their ocean voyage. They left Los Angeles on the beautifully named Cap Blanche, voyage number 287S, Lloyds register number 9311775. No more than 12 days at sea, over seven weeks were expended end-to-end. The load waited in LA to be aggregated with other cargo to fill a container, and at the Sydney end, there was the unloading and processing through Customs. Today, finally, I was to pick up the sorely needed clothes and engineering textbooks, and Stacia got her shoes and her precious sheet music.

            Driving up to the warehouse office, I had to weave between large trucks and the lifts that handle the huge ocean containers. I felt the need to explain to the pretty, young warehouse clerk that I’d never done this before. That was probably apparent. I explained my one concern: I was sure that my 19 boxes were on a pallet, but I had only a small rented van, so I’d need to break down the shipment to get it into the van. She gave me a very serious look and said:

            —You know you have to take everything with you, right?
The implication was that she didn’t want me leaving the pallet behind. The mental wheels started turning, but I was pretty sure that I could squeeze the pallet into the van.

            Then at the warehouse, the young, burly forklift driver set the tightly wrapped mound of boxes down next to my van. He looked skeptically at the tiny vehicle, gave me a very serious look, and said:

            —You know you have to take everything with you, right?

This was familiar. Clearly, these people did not want to be put in the pallet disposal business.        Much later, I realized that this conversation could have gone entirely a different way:

            —Gee, you know, sir, if you don’t have any use for that pallet, we’re always a little short of them around here…

            That is decidedly not what happened. Evidently there was once a Pallet Plague, devastating in its effects, which still lives in the memory of this warehouse company. The Pallet Plague: pallets obstructing the warehouse doors, pallets filling the pads where the giant seagoing containers should rest, pallets crunching under the wheels of the semis. Perhaps the horror predated my two young warehouse employees, but they had been inoculated with the legend, lending authority to their take-that-thing-with-you messages.

            Back to reality: with careful stacking on top of folded rear seats, all 19 of my boxes were squeezed into the little van, whose entire rear section was then devoted to the decrepit, splintered, unwanted pallet; the pallet, now scorned, that had borne its burden from LA to Sydney without complaint. The drive home was uneventful, and a little exertion with a hand truck got our long-awaited goods into the apartment. Living would now be a little less Spartan.

            It took less than an hour for the nagging thought to intrude: how am I going to get rid of the pallet? The other wrapping materials had fit nicely into the recycling bin, but no way was a shipping pallet going to squeeze in, or even into the room. Then I thought, Ah! I’ll call Bal! Bal is the cleaning and maintenance guy for our apartment building. Bal knows stuff. He’ll be helpful.

            —Bal, my household goods have arrived, and I have a shipping pallet to dispose of. Can you suggest how to proceed?

            —Oh no, that is the owner’s responsibility. We do not dispose of packing materials.

            —Uh, OK.

            —Not even the Council will accept packing materials for disposal.

(The Council is the North Sydney Council, the smallest unit of local government here.)

            —Hmmm. Do you have any thoughts on what I can do with the pallet?

            —I’m afraid you’ll have to take it to the tip.

Somehow, from deep in my primordial store of infrequently used English words, I knew that a “tip” was the dump, the transfer station, the place where garbage is aggregated. We were making progress. Bal told me where the nearest tip was, just a few kilometers from our apartment. And thank goodness, I hadn’t returned the rented van yet.

            The tip had the slightly acrid odor typical of large concentrations of garbage (anything larger than your kitchen dustbin.) An employee was hosing down the asphalt, creating a murky gray puddle of water oozing into the street. Ominously, there was a toll station at the entrance. On the toll booth was a sign that said, “Minimum $55 charge for up to 160 kilos.” Yow. With luck, that would not apply to me. Or perhaps the toll taker would see that my single pallet was so inconsequential that he would waive the fee.

            —What do you have?

            —One pallet.

            —Hmm, that’s going to cost you $55.

He looked extremely apologetic. I decided to exploit his embarrassment:

            —Do you have any other ideas?

Helpfully, he turned to a co-worker, and asked her if one outfit or another would recycle pallets. No luck though. I thanked him and asked if I could turn the van around in his facility, because I was going to find another way. His consent was accompanied by a sympathetic look. Even he, deputized by the Council to collect waste fees, could see that charging $55 to get rid of ten pounds of crappy wood was a bit dear. I think it’s pretty steep even for getting rid of 160 kilos of crappy wood, but perhaps that’s my American profligacy showing. And note that the toll guy did NOT let me sneak my ten pounds of crappy wood onto the enormous pile of crap in the tip.

            So I began to drive. And as I drove, without a plan, without a clue, I started to ruminate on the many disparate aspects of economics and human endeavor that had culminated in my wasting a beautiful afternoon in Sydney, trying to conform to the Australian social compact for waste reduction while trying to get rid of a goddamned shipping pallet.

            First, it was clear that Sydney is serious about minimizing waste disposal. I’d already sensed this earlier, on moving into our apartment. The “Rubbish and Recycling Room” on our floor had a sign next to the chute saying, “ONLY food waste is to go into this chute. ALL other materials are to go into the recycling bins.” A quick check on the bins proved that my neighbors indeed respected this procedure.  All manner of trash was in those recycling bins—empty Starbucks cups, plastic wrap, jar lids—which I would thoughtlessly have thrown out with the spoiled lettuce. I recognized the $55 tipping fee as being of a piece with this mentality. And clearly, my four-foot-by-four-foot pallet was a consequential addition to a landfill.

            So then, still driving with no destination, I began to wonder if there wasn’t some useful application to which my pallet could be put. One could immediately exclude “use the wood for building stuff.” Pallets are made of the softest, ugliest, cheapest, most flawed, flimsy, splintered wood that can be put to a useful purpose outside of a stove. But what uses for the entire assembled pallet? Ah, perhaps pallets would make suitable beds for homeless people! Some beds, like pallets, do have slats. And filling the pallet’s interior (where the forklift forks slide in) would yield a good insulator against the cold of a sidewalk. But I knew of no Pallet Distribution for Homeless Bedding Agency here in Sydney, nor anywhere else. This for the good and proper reason that, once we decide really to make homeless people more comfortable, we can do better than handing them shipping pallets. No other utilitarian purpose for a shipping pallet came to mind. Except shipping.

            Which begs the question: was my pallet really, truly worthless to the shipping industry? Why was I stuck with it? The shipping company in Los Angeles made no effort to recover it, nor any of the entities here in Sydney. Shippers no doubt purchase them by the pallet-load at some inconsequential price, since there is no effort made whatsoever to recover them. And my shipping fees no doubt included the pallet cost. I had actually purchased this pallet, having not realized it at the time; I was its legal owner. Evidently shipping pallets are ubiquitous, a drug on the market. Yet imagine how many billions of dollars of goods ride across the oceans on these unvalued objects.

            Sliding down yet another intellectual drainpipe, I began an appreciation of a pallet as an item of craft. Who or what makes pallets? Is it machine or man? Pallets are not beautiful, but they certainly are functional. The boards are not perfectly square, but nearly so; the simple design incorporates an infinite variety of cargo, sometimes of great weight. I drove past a stone and tile purveyor, noticing pallets bearing a full ton each of cut stone. These pallets truly seemed to groan.

            Yet pallets are beneath contempt. Look at an ordinary cardboard box sometime, one that is for office papers, for vegetables or for moving from Los Angeles to Sydney. The boxes are pre-printed with an identity, a pedigree: their manufacturer, their strength, their volume, even the date they were made. Not so the lowly shipping pallet. Nowhere is “Made in Malaysia” burned into the wood; there is no guarantee of performance, no pride of craftsmanship. Pallets are as trivial as wire clothes hangers. And yet again, the commerce of the world moves atop them.

            Eventually, I was granted a glimpse of Ultimate Truth, which was: “I want to get rid of this pallet and go home.” Thus ended the scattered musings of the warm afternoon. Another pearl: “To get rid of a pallet, one must go where there are other pallets.” Knowing something of Sydney’s economy, I headed for Parramatta Road. Parramatta Road is a six-lane, shopper-choked asphalt river of commerce headed west out of the city. Its decaying shops, ugly strip malls, sheet-metal warehouses and shiny new superstores might harbor the answer to my problem. They were a part of the infrastructure. They shipped, and were shipped to. They knew pallets.

            But a new thought intruded: what was an ethical protocol for pallet-dispatch? I had passed a shop or two with empty pallets sitting around; would they mind one more added to the pile? How did they ditch their surplus pallets, and what did it cost them? Perhaps some business would actually have been grateful for one more pallet. But which would that be?

            Without having any insight into that, it was clear that the larger the business, the less impact one more pallet would make, one way or the other. So I headed for the absolutely biggest enterprise I knew of: the Sydney Markets. I saw this sprawling complex while tackling a chore earlier in the month. Markets: pallets. But on arriving, I confronted, once again, a toll-taker at the entrance. It turns out that the public is not welcome at the Sydney Markets. Here instead is the region’s wholesale nexus; here is the vast distribution center where groceries are bought and sold by the ton for the grocery chains feeding Sydney’s four million.

            Retreating in defeat, I was taunted by the sight of vast stacks of pallets at the Sydney Markets. Unlike my rough, naked pallet, theirs were painted blue, their wood smooth and square. My pallet’s tattered look would have made it contemptible even among other pallets.

            But in less than five more minutes of aimless driving, I suddenly saw, and nearly passed before recognizing, the solution to the disposal problem. It was a forlorn storefront with stacks of pallets out front, and no one inside. It was obviously a failed business, its plate glass windows dark. Whether my pallet would be a burden or a blessing, I would never know. I pulled in abruptly, got my pallet out, chucked it onto a stack and hastened back onto the busy road. I never thanked my pallet for its selfless support of its cargo across the thousands of Pacific miles it travelled. Pricking me to hurry was a fantasy of some curmudgeon, heretofore unseen, running toward the van and growling,            

            —Hey, you, you can’t stick me with that pallet! Come back here!

            So, a craven end to a well-intentioned errand.  And yes, if you must ask, I used up about $20 of petrol on my pallet odyssey.        

            Epilogue: the word “pallet” is not used in the King James Bible. It does occur in the Revised Standard Version and the New American Version, in exactly one place. “Pallet” appears in the Gospels of Mark and John, in a story of a man lame from birth. Jesus, encountering the paralytic, said,       

            —Your sins are forgiven.

Onlookers decried that utterance as blasphemy, but then Jesus said,

            —Which do you think is easier, to say, your sins are forgiven, or to say, rise, take up your pallet (“bed” in the King James) and walk? But so you know that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins (he said to the paralytic) rise up, take your pallet and go home.

            My shipping pallet and the sleeping pallet of the paralytic were anonymous. We do not even know the name of the paralytic. I gave no thought to my pallet until confronted by the need to be rid of it. Yet these objects were dendritically connected to larger things.  My pallet taught me about how an economy relies on an infrastructure of valueless things and undervalued people. The paralytic’s pallet was a homely detail in the story of a miracle. The human mind is transported by inconsequential objects to realms worthy of its attention.