Kamps, Inc. and General Motors were named co-recipients of the Reusable Packaging Association’s 2025 Excellence in Reusable Packaging Award (Reusable System category) for a four-year, nationwide pallet management program that cut waste, improved efficiency, and extended pallet life across GM’s supply chain.
Grand Rapids, MI — September 2025. Kamps, Inc. announced it has won the Reusable Packaging Association’s 2025 Excellence in Reusable Packaging Award alongside General Motors, recognizing the partner’s comprehensive, multi-year pallet management program across GM’s U.S. operations. The Reusable System category honors end users and their suppliers who implement measurable reusable packaging systems in business-to-business supply chains.
Successful Pallet Program at General Motors
Over four years, Kamps and GM built a national program that gave end-to-end visibility of pallet assets, from collection and sortation to repair, harvesting, and redeployment. The centralized approach reduced new-pallet consumption, maximized the life of existing assets, and streamlined material flow across multiple locations. The partners advanced the program through joint research, pilots, and targeted capacity investments to ensure durability and continuity at scale.
“We are incredibly grateful to receive this award alongside the procurement and packaging engineering optimization teams at General Motors,” said Mitchell Kamps, CEO and president of Kamps, Inc. “This project is a perfect example of how our Comprehensive Pallet Life Cycle Services™ can drive real, measurable value. This is a win-win that showcases our commitment to sustainable and innovative packaging services that help our customers secure, sustain, and save.”
The recognition underscores a few key points. First of all, it shows how disciplined pallet lifecycle management, grounded in tracking, transparency, and repair-first decisioning, can deliver cost savings and environmental benefits while improving operational reliability for large, multi-site manufacturers. Secondly, it serves notice that it isn’t necessarily the latest and greatest asset that wins. In this case, the winners applied what some people might believe to be a legacy platform, the wooden pallet, in a highly successful reusable packaging use case.
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Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.
