- Reduces carbon footprint and materials consumption
- AFFINITY™ polyolefin elastomer improves the performance, sustainability of plastic pallets
Shanghai, China – Dow recently announced that Yelopack, a technology-based supply chain comprehensive management company, has adopted AFFINITY™ polyolefin elastomer (POE) in its existing plastic pallets, which it says will increase the life span of its pallets by five years – more than doubling their current life span. Improving the reusability of plastic pallets is in line with Dow’s new sustainability target of enabling 1 million metric tons of plastic to be collected, reused, or recycled through its direct actions and partnerships.
Prior to this collaboration, one of the company’s plastic pallets could be reused about 20 times before its end-of-life but by adding Dow’s AFFINITY™ POE, the pallet can be reused approximately 50 times at peak condition, even during harsh weather conditions such as winter where temperatures can fall below minus 30-degree Celsius.
In this tripartite collaboration between Dow, brand owner – Yelopack, and pallet producer – Shangnan Pallet Sharing, Dow’s materials science and technology expertise was leveraged to enhance the durability of Yelopack’s current polypropylene (PP) pallets, more than doubling the number of times their new pallets can be reused. This advances the sustainability goals of Yelopack and their customers while generating cost savings since the pallets will be replaced at a reduced frequency.
“Improving the recyclability and reusability of existing products is an important part of ensuring the sustainability of plastics, which we proudly support through research and development, and collaboration,” said Bambang Candra, Asia Pacific commercial vice president of Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics. “Partnering with Yelopack to extend the lifecycle of pallets supports our goal of promoting a circular economy for plastics.”
Pallets play a critical role in logistics for productivity and product safety reasons; there are billions of pallets in circulation around the world every day. While wooden pallets are more commonly used, plastic pallets can be more durable, lighter, and safer. Yelopack has developed a new generation of plastic pallets embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RIFD) and Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) chips, enabling the pallets to be easily identified and traced and hence re-collected and reused.
“At Yelopack, our purpose is to advance the circularity of plastic pallets. We are continuously finding ways to ensure that our pallets are the most sustainable in the world, which is why this collaboration with Dow is significant because our pallets can now remain in the supply chain longer,” said Mr. Xiang Shi, Founder, and CEO of Yelopack. “The durability of our pallets greatly reduces carbon footprint, and as a result, 98% less material consumption compared to a traditional pallet. Daily, over 400,000 pallets are being circulated across industries from fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) to petrochemicals, and the number is still growing. We are confident that circularity can be achieved.”
“As a pallet manufacturer, designing a highly durable plastics pallet that can be reused for five years is not easy,” said Ms. Yemin Sun, CEO of Shangnan Pallet Sharing, “With Dow’s advanced material science technology, we are able to improve the performance of our pallets to meet stringent operation requirements, especially in difficult environments, throughout its extended service life. The shared pallets are currently used in many world-leading companies including Dow. With the increased number of pallet circulation, we hope to help our customers and the industry reduce their carbon footprint in the long run.”
About Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics
Packaging and Specialty Plastics (P&SP), a business unit of Dow (NYSE: DOW), combines core strengths of R&D, worldwide reach, broad product lines and industry expertise to deliver high performing technologies for end use markets in food packaging, personal hygiene, infrastructure, consumer goods and transportation. P&SP is one of the world’s largest producers of polyethylene resins, functional polymers, and adhesives, and enabled by Pack Studios, is a leading innovator and collaborator across the value chain on sustainable application development and circular economy life-cycle design for plastics.
About Yelopack
Yelo is committed to providing its industrial customers with smart logistic solutions based on a shared pallet and package service. Established by August of 2018, its portfolio has extended from Yeloflex logistic service platform to Yelo Shared Pallet, Yelo Shared Container, and Yelo supply chain service, etc. Embedded with RIFD and NB-IoT technology, together with the proprietary arithmetic, Yelo provides a total solution to digitalize customers’ supply chain to achieve lower cost and better user experience. All the package products Yelo provided are 100% recyclable, which is appreciated by its customers looking for a low carbon option. Yelo’s operations are in many countries including China, Russia, Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, and can offer service to customers with shared pallet and packaging offerings within the Asia Pacific region. With the vision of “Click to Global Business”, the company aims to build up a global network of smart logistic packaging services to better serve its customers with enhanced supply chain productivity.
About Shangnan Pallet Sharing
As a logistic packaging manufacturer, Shangnan Pallet Sharing (SPS) developed a series of new packaging formats, including shared pallets, flexible industrial bulk containers (IBC), form-fill-seal (FFS) film, and stretch hood film, etc. To meet the customers’ need for plastic circularity, SPS also invested in a recycled plastic facility to convert waste plastic package into high-quality post-consumer recyclable (PCR) material for reuse in applications like its plastic pallet. SPS owns manufacturing sites in Shanghai, Taixing (Jiangsu), Sanmeng (Zhejiang), Zhanjiang (Guangdong), etc., with a capacity of over 1.5 million pallets per year.