Cathy Morio, Recovery Development Manager at The Pallet LOOP

As The Pallet LOOP’s Recovery Development Manager, I spend my days ensuring we collect back as many of our green LOOP pallets as possible, so they don’t go to waste. Most people may think pallets are boring. However, without them, industries we rely on, day in, day out, would grind to a halt. Pallets are the backbone of supply chains around the world. Yet all too often, they are used once and discarded, ending up as waste or low-grade biomass.

At The Pallet LOOP we see pallets differently. They aren’t site clutter or an annoyance to be ‘dealt with’. They are a valuable asset that we should look after, recover, repair and reuse. In the construction sector, recovering pallets is not the easiest of tasks. When it comes to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pallets typically end up in warehouses or at distribution centres, making it easier to locate them en masse. As a result, really high reuse rates, in excess of 90%, are typically achieved. In the construction sector, pallets end up going everywhere so we must cast our net much wider to find them. A proportion go to distribution centres, which is good. But many end up on building sites and in merchants’ yards. Some even end up with consumers, on their driveways – making recovery harder.

The disparate nature of pallet distribution in the construction industry means my role requires a mix of logistics, relationship-building, and problem-solving skills.

  • I work closely with The Pallet LOOP’s wider collections team to ensure all new customers are set up on the system and collection requests are booked in as efficiently as possible.
  • I liaise with the transport and logistics teams at Scott Pallets to ensure collections are scheduled and customers know when we are coming out to them. Together we also deal with any collections queries or issues as quickly as possible.
  • I work side-by-side with The Pallet LOOP’s team of account managers. Together we identify companies throughout the building materials supply chain to target to sign up for our collection service, to ultimately ensure more pallets get returned for reuse. They are also the main point of contact for existing collections customers with queries about pallet returns.
  • I also work with the LOOP partnerships, innovation and marketing team to devise communications and campaigns to help drive up pallet returns.

Central to all this is reviewing The Pallet LOOP’s collection metrics. All LOOP pallets feature an RFID tag, which enables us to report back to our customers on inbound and outbound pallet movements plus associated financial savings and environmental impact. As such, I spend a lot of my time crunching numbers and generating reports. These are needed for my colleagues for internal reporting. I also help create reports for our building material customers, who want to know how many of their pallets are being returned for reuse, and where we are against historical industry recovery rates.

Sixteen months in, we’re making good progress. LOOP pallets first entered the UK construction market in May 2024 – carrying bagged plaster from British Gypsum. Today we’ve got four material manufacturers using our pallets with almost 1.3 million pallets issued to date. We’ve taken pallet recovery rates from around 10% to 30% on some of our specifications. We’ve massively reduced waste and carbon. In doing so we’ve saved our collections customers an estimated £6.8M on waste costs – achieved by not putting pallets in skips. We’ve also paid almost £650k back to the sector via our LOOP PayBack incentive. This is an excellent start, but there’s still a long way to go to reach the return rates achieved in FMCG.

Changing behaviours, which have been embedded over decades, takes time. This isn’t just about collecting pallets; it’s about making recovery the norm in an industry that’s historically done things a different way. It’s about demonstrating that a circular approach can be simple, efficient, and beneficial to everyone involved.

We’re getting there and I take pride in knowing that every pallet we recover is one that can go back out to do its job again, supporting the supply chain while reducing unnecessary waste. It’s a small action, but when you do it at scale, it makes a significant difference for the businesses we work with.

If you are looking for an easy way to get rid of pallets (green and white) that makes financial and environmental sense, please contact The Pallet LOOP collections team on email: collections@thepalletloop.com or by calling: 0800 024 6130.