The empty-mile problem
Half of pallet logistics is moving air. A truck delivers pallets, drives away empty, and a different truck arrives later to collect the empties. Two movements, two sets of emissions, two invoices, one outcome.
A closed loop collapses that into one movement: the same vehicle that delivers loaded pallets leaves with your empties and cores. Our load factor across the fleet runs around 82% because we plan every outbound against an inbound.
Why it is harder than it sounds
Closed loops require three things to line up: your empties must be ready when the truck arrives, there must be physical space to stage them, and the volumes have to roughly match. If any one fails, the driver waits, and a waiting driver destroys the economics for everyone on that route.
This is why we survey a site before proposing a loop. We are looking for a staging position, a forklift that is not permanently in use elsewhere, and a receiving person who knows the plan.
What it saves, measured
On our own routes, a closed loop reduces truck movements per cycle from two to one, which halves the transport emissions attributable to a pallet's turnaround. In carbon terms that is the difference between about 3.8 and 1.9 kg CO₂e per unit on collection and redelivery combined.
Commercially, it typically reduces a customer's combined pallet purchase and disposal cost by 15 to 25%, because we price the paired trip rather than two separate ones.
The named-driver detail
Recurring routes get the same driver. This sounds sentimental and is actually operational: a driver who knows your gate code, your dock height, which corner you stage empties in and who to find when the forklift is busy completes the stop in half the time.
We assign named drivers on every standing route and we try hard not to change them. When we do have to, the new driver rides along once first.
Where closed loops do not work
Sites that consume pallets without generating empties — anyone whose product ships out on the pallet and never comes back — cannot run a true loop. Neither can sites with no space to stage, or sites where volumes are wildly asymmetric.
In those cases we pair the route with somebody else's inbound instead. The customer sees a normal delivery; the efficiency happens behind the scenes on our route plan.