Pallets for the defence and naval supply chain

Precision engineering firms, fabricators, electrical and electronic assemblers, coatings and finishing specialists, fit-out contractors, and the storage and logistics operators who move all of it. These are ordinary commercial businesses that happen to trade into a defence-related market, and their pallet requirements come from the goods they handle rather than from the customer at the end of the chain.

If you are one of those businesses, this page is about the practical side: what kind of pallet suits the items you move, and what to tell us when you order.

Engineered components are frequently heavy for their size, which means concentrated point loads rather than an evenly spread pallet. A general used pallet is often the wrong choice here — not because it is worn, but because the weight lands on two bearers rather than across the deck. Tell us the weight and the footprint and we will recommend accordingly.

Consistency is the other recurring requirement. Where items are handled repeatedly, stored in racking or passed between sites, pallets that vary in size and height cause problems that outweigh the saving on the timber. New pallets, or a tightly sorted used specification, are usually worth it.

A lot of this work involves items sitting in storage for extended periods, sometimes in unheated or partly exposed space. Timber moves with humidity, so if pallets are going into long-term storage with sensitive contents, it is worth discussing plastic pallets instead.

Where goods move out and pallets come back, we can look at collecting the surplus rather than letting it build up. Anything leaving the UK has marking requirements that need checking rather than assuming — our sister site exportpallets.co.uk deals with that subject properly.