F.A.Q.
Pallets can be a challenge sometimes. That’s why we are here. Use the Frequently Ask Questions page to have all of your Kamps and general pallet questions answered.
General Kamps Questions
We manage around 8.8 million pallets every week.
We disassemble or repair around 7.5 million pallets every week.
Kamps provides comprehensive pallet life-cycle services. That means that as long as pallets play a role in your supply chain, we can provide a value-added service for you.
Learn more about our pallet services here.
Kamps is a national pallet supplier as well as a pallet recycler, which means we service organizations from coast to coast.
Visit our locations page to find a Kamps location near you.
Kamps Pallets owns and maintains more than 8,250 trailers nationwide. To keep our trailers in good condition, Kamps has utilizes local (sometimes company owned) trailer maintenance facilities. Many trailers are placed at customers’ facilities to better coordinate pickups and deliveries.
Due to our vast resources and reach, Kamps has the ability to drop trailers at your location and swap trailers any time of the day. Dropping and swapping trailers maximizing your warehouse space as it allows us to quickly haul away unusable or undesired pallets from your facility.
Kamps is always looking to build our network of pallet partners, and we would love to hear from you!
Because customer service is paramount in everything we do, we hold our pallet partners to the same standards as our facilities.
This means that there are a few initial prerequisites that need to be met:
Your organization has a facility with dock doors and can accommodate semi-trucks.
Your organization has the facilities and capabilities to meet sudden increases in demand.
You are dedicated to customer service above all.
In addition to these basic standards, we ask all our trading partners (including pallet partners) to abide by our Code of Conduct.
Click here to read our Code of Conduct.
General Pallet Knowledge
When discussing pallets, you would say the stringer length first and the deck board length second.
Many factors go into how much weight a wooden pallet can support. These factors include the size of a pallet, what kind of wood is used, and the overall design of the pallet. For example, a heavy-duty hardwood pallet with many top and bottom boards will hold more weight than a light-duty softwood pallet. This, of course, comes with drawbacks as the heavy-duty pallet will itself weigh more. This can put additional stress on your team if your team is required to manually move and stack pallets.
A remanufactured pallet is a pallet manufactured from used components recovered from disassembled pallets. Remanufactured pallets can utilize all used components or have a mixture of new and used components. For example, a pallet that uses all new stringers and all used top and bottom deck boards is considered a remanufactured pallet.
A reconditioned pallet is a repaired pallet. Repairs include strategically inserting companion stringers, replacing a deck board, or using staples to mitigate stringer cracks.
A stringer is the component that sits between the top and bottom of a pallet. Think of it as the patty in a hamburger. It is used to support the parts of the deck. It is a continuous, longitudinal, solid, or notched beam component of the pallet.
Deck boards are the wooden (flat) boards that comprise the top and bottom of a wooden pallet. They are usually fastened to the wooden stringers using heavy-duty industrial nails.
To learn more about the importance of deck boards, click here to read our “The Impact of Deck Board Thickness and Density” blog article.
Pallet pooling is a program whereby Kamps Pallets will rent you a pallet (for a closed-loop system), track it to your customer, and then retrieve the pallet to start the process over again.
A core pallet is a used 48×40 wooden pallet, it is also the most commonly used wooden pallet in North America.
To learn more about GMAs and Core Pallets, read the official article on our blog.
Buying Pallets From Kamps Questions
Kamps Pallets specializes in large quantity, business-to-business, pallet solutions.
Due to this, we are unable to service personal, DIY, projects that require less than 25 pallets at a time.
For those interested in orders of less than 25 pallets at a time for personal projects, we recommend searching on websites such as eBay or reading this article from Packaging Revolution on how to find free pallets.
Because of all of the factors that go into the price of a pallet, it is impossible to have a single price. Every pallet is unique and market conditions heavily impact the price of a pallet. Prices can anywhere range from $5.00 to $25.00 per pallet.
Market conditions, supply and demand, raw materials, and labor are some of the factors that impact the price of a pallet. Another factor specific to 48×40 GMA Pallet pricing is the “Core Cost”. As mentioned in the previous listing under “General Pallet Knowledge”, a core pallet is a used 48×40 GMA pallet. Pallet recyclers usually pay a price to haul away these pallets from supply chain endpoints. The price a pallet recycler pays for a core heavily influences the final price of that pallet once it’s repaired and/or sorted.
Selling Pallets To Kamps Questions
How many pallets we buy at a time depends on your location and market.
Ideally, we try to purchase pallets by the truckload – 400 at a time.
However, in locations where a physical Kamps location is present, we will purchase pallets in quantities as low as 25 at a time. We recommend contacting your local Kamps facility first, as the sizes and styles of pallets we purchase will vary based on the market.
Markets with a partner location instead of a Kamps location, will only purchase truckload quantities.
Learn more about the difference between Kamps locations and partner locations.
The amount Kamps will pay per pall depends on a variety of factors.
The most important are:
Size of the pallet
Condition of the pallet
Where you are located
Pallet composition (Kamps only buys wood pallets)
To learn more about this topic, check out our in-depth blog post that explains the factors that determine value when selling pallets.