Recycle Pallets To Reduce Landfill

Earlier this year Bluewater shopping centre in Kent received praise for its innovative scheme to recycle the hundreds of waste pallets used during the course of any working day. Its solution was to operate a daily round collecting them up and using the timber to create what the company calls an eco centre study centre. Among the items built with the old timber are a classroom, new toilet and a ramp for disabled shoppers.

It's the kind of move celebrated by London's green Oscars which seeks to celebrate attempts by business to improve sustainability, and recognises the problems businesses face when dealing with left over pallets.

Throughout Britain there are almost 100 million pallets in use at any one time. Some major companies can be left with as many as 150 left over the course of the week and that can be difficult to deal with. Once their job is done, they often just litter the place presenting a growing fire risk as they do. Every year tens of thousands of them end up in landfill, making a mockery of government attempts to cut down the amount of waste we, as a nation, throw out.

To try and solve the problem a number of collection companies have emerged that spend their time collecting and reusing them in a number of ways. Typically they are broken down into component parts of placed through a shredder and reduced to chips, which can then be reused for cardboard manufacture.

Useful as that is, it might seem to some a little dull. In Austria two young architects set about a bold plan to combine art with sustainability. They decided to put them to the use they seemed to be crying out for: construction. The result was their striking sustainable house made entirely out of pallets.

Rather than destroy them they simply fixed them up. In general most were only damaged slightly and with a small addition could be repaired sufficiently to be used as a building material. A few prototypes later and they had their final design.

As well as cutting down on the environmental impact they believe they have hit upon an ideal material for construction. Their standardised size and interconnectivity means they are easy to store and can be tailored to suit the individual needs of the house.

Best of all though they are freely available. Pallets are everywhere. If their plans were to be applied into more general use, they believe they can result in significant cuts in transporting costs further reducing CO2 emissions. It might seem like a bit of pie in the sky thinking, but if we're looking to reduce our carbon footprint, then turning to locally sourced reusable materials such as these could well be the answer.