Climate change and anthropogenic, i.e., ‘man-made’, global warming are serious concerns. Much of the science is apocalyptic. Dire warnings abound, and nightmare scenarios are peddled. While most people and most corporations express a desire to do something, they often just have no real idea what to do to mitigate their own contributions to environmental decay. There is, however, hope and possibility. Changing old assumptions and rethinking simple processes in a sophisticated manner can bend curves and achieve real results. Switching away from wood-based pallets towards alternative fiber pallets such as sugarcane bagasse is one such paradigm shift for the sophisticated. Even changing just a few boards of an otherwise all wooden pallet with bagasse planks can have a discernible impact on achieving corporate goals of supply chain carbon reduction.
Trees – lots of them, and the older, the better – are one of the magic bullets of mitigating and reversing climate change. Trees are basically captured or sequestered carbon. Through photosynthesis, all plants process CO₂, and embed it in wood, bark, leaves, . When harvested, that carbon is reintroduced into the atmosphere. Left in place, it becomes a reserve of environmental carbon. The logic is simple: more trees equals a healthier planet, and the older and more substantial those trees are, the more each one reduces dangerous carbon from the planetary system. The single greatest sectoral use of wood in North America is wooden pallets. By some reckoning of the Center for Pallet Design at Virginia Tech University 45% of America’s hardwood and 15% of its softwood is used in pallet logistics – more than that of housing! Switching from managed wood sources to agricultural waste of sugarcane bagasse makes a huge loop in the Circular Economy possible. The once seemingly endless native forests of America are pretty much gone – less than 2% of America’s forests are old growth. Incorporating bagasse into the supply chain diverts an agricultural waste, reduces the demand for trees, and fundamentally alters the overall life cycle contribution of pollution by reducing GHG and CO².
The vast majority of forests are secondary growth and managed monocultures; this is not healthy. Everything made of wood/paper/cardboard has long been peddled as a renewable resource. It is not. Forests today are shadows of their past selves largely due to the cycles by which they are utilized almost as a crop. The evolving scientific consensus in forestry is that forests have a significant economic and environmental contribution simply left as they are – left to heal the areas they grow and promote refuges for wildlife. Governmental regulation globally is tilting towards schemes of so-called Carbon Credits. Switching from wood to bagasse can be accounted for carbon credits. In March of 2022, the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued new guidelines on publicly traded companies that will force ALL firms to account for their carbon usage by 2023. Switching from wood to bagasse allows for an audited improvement in greenhouse gas emissions that is now required for financial disclosure reasons. What was once thought of as peripheral to considerations in the boardroom has moved to center stage.
‘Carbon Sinks’ are the preferred policy goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One of the most productive carbon sink areas of the entire world is the Eastern United States, particularly the Appalachian and Great Lakes Regions. Americans aren’t used to thinking of our own environment as exotic, but according to NASA the State of Ohio has a greater range of biodiversity than almost anywhere else on Earth. Who knew?!?
America’s natural native resources are of an uncommon lushness globally, though we rarely think of it in these terms. The collective tragedy of modern times is to see so much remarkable abundance as ordinary, and then to use it for the utterly mundane – a wood pallet. As governments and electorates worldwide call for solutions to impending disasters, a rethinking of forestry and agricultural products is needed. Bagasse pallets are one such solution.
As Earth faces unknown consequences for the habits of mankind in the past few centuries, nothing stands as prominently as a rethinking of the importance of forestry and trees, and a need to lessen the commercial imperative to process so much of our natural patrimony into something as fleetingly passing as a commercial wooden pallet. There are alternatives, and using pallets made from natural fibers of agricultural waste such as sugarcane bagasse is one of those solutions. Rethink the past, rewrite the future.