When you buy wood pallets for overseas shipments, you typically need to use products that meet international ISPM15 pest control standards. These pallets have gone through a specialist heat or chemical treatment to ensure that they can't carry pests into other countries.

While both heat and chemical treatments are effective past control measures, it may pay you to use heat-treated products. What are the benefits?

Get a Cleaner Environmental Footprint

If you take your company's environmental responsibilities seriously, then heat-treated pallets are the way to go. This treatment uses hot air to ensure that the wood is free from pests. This has a minimal environmental impact.

If you use a chemical treatment, then the company that treats the wood sprays chemicals all over the wood or finished pallets to kill possible pests. Some of these chemicals escape into the environment where they may have adverse effects on the ozone layer, for example.

You can also recycle the wood in a heat-treated pallet when it is no longer fit for transportation use. For example, the wood would be suitable for chipping or other recycling treatments. You can't necessarily recycle chemically-treated pallets.

Reduce Your Costs

Heating pallets has some knock-on financial benefits because of the way the wood reacts to the treatment. These benefits could reduce your purchasing, damage and shipping costs.

For example, when you put wood through heat treatment, the heat sucks all the moisture out of the wood. It dries it out completely and makes it harder. This doesn't happen to pallets that go through a chemical treatment. They retain their natural moisture and composition.

If pallets lose all their moisture, then they last longer. They withstand damp conditions better without rotting, shrinking or swelling. If wood stays dry and intact, then it won't be such a target for pests in the future.

Also, if wood hardens up a little, then it is less likely to get damaged in transit. Pallets could have a longer working life and protect the goods they carry more robustly. This reduces pallet replacement and shipment damage costs.

Wood also tends to be lighter after heat treatment. The lighter your pallets are, the less your shipments weigh. Lighter shipments cost less money which could increase your profits.

To find out more about heat treatments and their benefits, contact pallet suppliers. Companies with experience of producing ISPM15 compliant products can talk you through your options.