PALLET PARADISE
New uses for inexpensive wood and a recipe for homemade white fly pesticide.
BITS AND PIECES
The most inexpensive lumber you'll ever
find.
They dwell behind loading docks, litter shipping yards, and
proliferate in stock rooms around the world. They represent
millions of tons of hardwood each year, and have a service
life of perhaps a few weeks or months. Each year in the
United States alone, there are about 460 million wooden
pallets manufactured, over half of which are discarded
after the first use. Most people simply don't realize that
this otherwise titanic waste could be one of our
eases—and certainly least expensive-sources for
building lumber.
The wood used for pallets comprises 10 percent of the
lumber and 50 percent of the hard wood cut down each year
in the United States. It is estimated that the amount of
wood used for pallets is equivalent to the amount of wood
used in the frames of 300,000 average-size American homes.
Although the number produced in most foreign countries does
not match U.S. production, pallets made in Africa, Asia,
and South America often contain endangered tropical woods,
such as mahogany.
A fascinating and informative book entitled, not
surprisingly, Fun Projects Using Wooden Pallets,
by Don and Peggy Crissey, has come to the rescue. The
couple, now from Silsbee, Texas, owned a container business
in Fort Myers, Florida, several years ago, where they
bought and sold various types of containers with the main
purpose of recycling them. One day they found a bunch of
decaying wooden pallets inside some ocean cargo containers
they had purchased. They recovered enough lumber from the
pallets to rebuild their front porch.
After this undertaking, they continued working with wooden
pallets in virtually every household construction project.
"Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as
everyone else and thinking something different;" explains
Crissey, offering his favorite quote from Nobel prize
winning physician Albert Szent-Gydrgyl.
Pallets are most often regarded as junk, because they
frequently have a weathered and tarnished look. But Don and
Peggy contend that simple deck cleaners, costing about $2
per gallon, will make the weathered look vanish
immediately. If you're not thrilled by this approach, a
simple soap-and-water solution and some sandpaper does the
job. There are also some hints to finding pallets
before they become weathered, which we'll leave
for Don and Peggy to explain.
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