Wooden pallets have a wide range of uses, not only for at-home DIY projects, but outside of the home, too. By donating your excess wooden pallets you can help to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. At the same time you can even contribute to a good cause in your local community while helping to reduce carbon emissions.
There are many ways you can donate your wooden pallets: one way is by finding local community programs looking for pallets to use in their work. Alternatively, you can either take them to your local recycling plant, or contact Easy Donation Pickup to do the job for you (always call ahead to see which materials they can accept.).
Untreated vs.Treated Pallets
Typically once a wooden pallet is no longer fit for use, it is broken down into parts to be recycled or reused. Untreated pallets can be taken straight to the recycling center – however there is another good reason to call in advance to check they will accept your donation.
While in some cases pallets can be used for biofuel, biofilters and firewood, in the case of treated wooden pallets this is inadvisable. Some wooden pallets are treated with chemicals such as arsenic to ensure protection from biohazards and pests, which is highly toxic to humans and wildlife.
Building Community With Pallets
Outside of their traditional role of being used for shipping and containment, wooden pallets can be used to help the community and support the environment. Some examples of this include:
- Using pallets to create furniture such as picnic tables and benches.
- Helping out local wildlife through using untreated pallets to build shelters and bird feeders.
- Donating pallets to be used at food banks in order to transport packages.
- Untreated mulched pallets can be used to make compost for plants.
- In community art projects, pallets can be used in a variety of ways – for example as backboards for paintings, or as urban sculptures.
- Pallets can be also used to make planters and garden borders.
Further examples of how palettes can be used to help can be found all over the world; from sustainable pallet houses built for refugees, to furniture-making projects designed to offer homeless people skills in carpentry.
Fighting Climate Change
From air travel to shipping to being out on the road, the transport of pallets contributes to greenhouse gasses, even before they arrive at their destination. Rather than being sent to landfill, they can be reused, repurposed and recycled instead.
Using pallets means less logging, which means more trees are able to remain in place, helping to protect our climate; there’s even a calculator you can use which shows how much carbon you can actually save through recycling wooden pallets.
Reducing Plastic Use
Although plastic pallets are easy to sterilize and stack, they contribute to the widespread use of non-biodegradable plastics polluting the environment. While natural materials like wood decompose over a relatively short period of time, plastic pallets can take hundreds of years to decompose.
By comparison, the composition of wooden pallets is easier to work with, allowing them to be transformed into a variety of objects for use in community and charity projects. While they might look unassuming, the simplicity of the humble wooden pallet makes it a multitasking hero.
