Cradle to Cradle® Certified designation for our presswood products verifies the use of healthy materials and eco-intellgent design.
Read More...
Wood Product Recycling - Inca Presswood Pallets
Greener Earth Pallet: Inca Pallets Leave a “Greener” Planet
Urgent Environmental Concern: Source Reduction & Recycling
In the past, natural resources were taken for granted. Today, however, these resources are rapidly being depleted and our disposable society lifestyle is quickly catching up with us. Landfills are becoming full and places to dispose of waste products are diminishing. The need for source reduction and recycling is more than ever being realized as an urgent concern. Companies must produce and use environmentally safe and renewable products that are manufactured using minimal natural resources and energy. Every aspect of the manufacturing process must be considered. Pallets, once part of this disposal problem, can now provide solutions.
Advantages of Wood: The Natural Material
Wood is an environmentally friendly material by nature, being produced mainly from sun energy and not valuable fossil fuels as with other materials. Compared to wood, the energy required to produce other materials is far greater. For example, it takes 6 times more energy to produce plastic, 23 times more energy to produce steel and 126 times more energy to produce aluminum. Trees filter out the carbon dioxide pollutants that man and machine expel, and by giving oxygen back to us, trees keep the ecosystem in balance and help prevent the global warming trend our planet is experiencing.
The Inca Advantage: Complete Use of Timber
The Inca Pallet is both source reducing and recyclable with its use of natural resources.
Inca Presswood Pallets are produced from low grade timber stands that are uneconomical for other purposes. For example, the “push over” or debris of strip mining operations (usually pushed over and buried), farm land and urban clearing (where the timber is either landfilled or used for mulch) and forest tree thinning are often used. In fact, one of the best forest tree services Inca production provides is the clearing of timber for environmental tree thinning. This procedure removes underdeveloped trees from crowded wood plantations providing more growing room for the better trees to mature to full size. This is important when a forest gets old and over-crowded, because trees barely grow while competing for space. Trees actually begin to use oxygen rather than yield it, causing more trees to decay rather than grow. Thus, this management of the forest is necessary to have more efficient and more productive timber stands.
Source Reduction Inca Uses the Whole Tree – No Waste!
The wood chip ingredients for Inca Presswood Pallets are directly produced in the woods. A machine is used to swallow a complete tree, including the trunk, bark, leaves and branches as they are fed into the inlet of the machine for processing. Wood chips are discharged and are blown directly into a semi-trailer for immediate shipment to the Inca Pallet factory. No debris! No waste! No pollution!
At the Inca facility, the wood chips are further processed, and astonishingly, 93% of the biomass of the tree is used in the Inca Pallet product. The unused 7% represents fine dust from the leaves and bark and is used to provide energy in the factory’s boiler system. Again, nearly complete recovery and utilization of material occurs, without fouling our environment.
Hardwood Tree Biomass Usage
| Wood Pallets | Inca Pallets | Resource Utilization Differential | |
| % of Tree Used | 28 |
93 |
65 |
Recyclable – Inca Pallet Process:
Utilizing Wood Waste
Today, Inca Pallets are being made more and more from uncontaminated, selected industrial wood waste, and recycled, spent Inca Pallets. Inca Presswood Pallets, Ltd., is accepting selected wood waste as raw material for its pallet product. Otherwise, this wood waste would go into landfills or be incinerated.
Inca Pallet customers are returning spent Incas when they purchase new stock. The spent Inca Pallets are a ground-up portion of the recycled pallet product.
Re-Use & Recycling: Once is Not Enough
Several methods of re-use of the “spent” presswood pallet have been implemented that are mutually beneficial to industry and to the environment. Examples of the re-use for ground Inca Pallets include:
- Livestock bedding
- Absorbent floor compound
- Top soil additive
- Compost material
- Boiler fuel feed stock
- Ingredient for new Inca Pallets
Instead of dumping pallets into landfills, they are constructively used in new products.
Inca Pallets Require Less of the Environment:
Provide More For You
In pursuit of natural resource source reduction and dedication to environmental responsibility, continued research and development efforts have produced new manufacturing methods. These methods allow us to offer the pallet user a recycled pallet product that uses reduced new timber resource and less energy to produce. As a service to our customers who are making ethical environmental decisions, we have instituted programs that encourage exchanging “old Incas for new” when shipments of new Incas are received.
Inca Presswood Pallets require less of our environment; less timber, less energy, less waste, therefore, with more and healthier trees, Incas leave our planet a little bit “greener”. That’s why we say,
“Incas are the ‘Greener’ Pallet”
Manufactured according to the werzalit process.
