Industry-Standard Pallet Satisfies All FDA Requirements
File photo: Rehrig Pacific pallet.LOS ANGELES — Manufacturer Rehrig Pacific has announced that their FM Approved Non-Halogenated Flame Retardant pallet has been officially tested and certified to pass all requirements for FDA-regulated materials. This means that Rehrig’s GMA NHFR pallets are both food safe and fire retardant. The company calls the news “a groundbreaking new development with revolutionary implications for food and food safety.”
“In this business, safety is everything,” said Adam Gurga, National Manager of Rehrig’s Material Handling & Bulk Solutions group. “I’m incredibly proud of the Rehrig team for building a product that addresses so many diverse safety concerns at the same time: our pallet is food safe and fire retardant without compromising on durability. In fact, it remains one of the toughest and most resilient plastic pallets on the market today. It’s a no-brainer. This is the only pallet available that gives our customers all of the strength and safety they’re looking for, without any tradeoffs.”
Rehrig recently subjected its Non-Halogenated Flame Retardant Pallets to a Threshold of Regulation (TOR) assessment conducted by an independent third party laboratory, who analyzed the composition of the pallet for any potential known food safety risks. The rigorous analysis confirmed that Rehrig’s pallets meet all applicable FDA food safety guidelines.
Most fire-retardant pallets contain bromine, which can leech into foods (even through primary packaging such as cardboard) and create a major food safety risk. To date, bromine-free fire-retardant pallets have included glass fibers to help reinforce the pallets, which also presents a food health and safety risk. Rehrig Pacific has overcome this problem by engineering a proprietary non-halogenated composition using only GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) components. The result is a pallet that is fire retardant, highly durable, and completely safe–even for direct food contact.
Last year, the same product set the industry standard for durability after Virginia Tech University’s Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design subjected it to an exhaustive battery of tests created to simulate real-world warehouse and supply chain conditions. Rehrig’s pallets survived as many as 200 cycles, making them the first flame-retardant pallets on the market to achieve these standards. In addition, Rehrig’s pallets can rack up to 3,200 pounds, a strength standard which few plastic pallets and no other GMA-spec pallets are able to achieve.
Rehrig states that its exciting new developments in injection-molding technology, product design, and composition have allowed new breakthroughs for greater safety for everyone from plant workers to distributors and consumers.
Source: Rehrig Pacific
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