New California Bill AB 1760 “Bulk Merchandise Pallets” changes the rules for junk dealers and recyclers

What happens to plastic and wooden shipping pallets when they’re lost, forgotten or misplaced? They stack up. There’s hardly a wholesaler or distribution center that isn’t cluttered with stacks and stacks of pallets of every description. Most are gathering dust while waiting to be picked up by their owners. But some will never be picked up as they’ve been lost or forgotten. 

Disposing of lost pallets can be a real headache for the wholesaler or distribution center, as well as a financial loss to the owner or renter. And since they do have an ultimate owner, they must be treated – under law – as someone’s property. They can’t simply be discarded by a distributor, for example, when they become an inconvenience. 

California has recently passed legislation, AB 1760, that equips wholesalers and distribution centers with more options for pallets that have not been reclaimed. After 35 days they can contact recyclers and junk dealers to pick them up, or they can charge storage fees that then become the responsibility of the owners. 

We at ACSIS applaud the bill. However, this bill alone does not address a core issue that losing pallets is losing money, and there’s simply no reason for it. 

An ACSIS customer told us they were losing more than $10,000,000 per year in lost trays and dollies that were being used to distribute their bakery products. ACSIS saved them millions of dollars every year by putting in place an easy to implement and manage solution for tracking these RTIs (which function as pallets for baked goods).

Whether baking trays would be considered pallets under the new California law is unclear to us, but we can say from long experience that tracking and tracing returnable transport items (RTIs) is among the easiest, highest value steps supply chain managers can take to reduce costs, protect timelines, and make supply chains more sustainable.

ACSIS supply chain visibility solutions include the ability to track and trace every returnable transport item in your supply chain, from pallets, to canisters, to trays, crates, boxes, racks, and much more. If it’s a physical asset that’s bigger than a pinhead, ACSIS can serialize it, track it, and provide advanced analytics that will pinpoint sources of loss that can help you tighten up your supply chain costs for years.

Ask ACSIS today about our RTI visibility solutions.