Pack Expo: United Pallet Services to partner with Virginia Tech for pallet session

United Pal­let Ser­vices (UPSI), mak­ers of the point­GUARD Pal­let Pro­tec­tor, is part­ner­ing up with the Cen­ter for Pack­ag­ing and Unit Load Design (CPULD) at Vir­ginia Tech Uni­ver­sity to bring an edu­ca­tion pre­sen­ta­tion dur­ing Pack Expo Inter­na­tional next month. With the goal of edu­cat­ing sup­ply chain atten­dees on enhanc­ing the strength of wooden pal­lets to make them more reusable, the ses­sion will be part of the Reusable Pack­ag­ing Association’s (RPA) Learn­ing Cen­ter, an edu­ca­tion forum that brings real-life, solution-based ses­sions to atten­dees free of charge. The Learn­ing Cen­ter will be located inside the RPA Pavil­ion, which groups mem­bers into one loca­tion dur­ing Pack Expo.

The ses­sion, to be held Mon­day, Novem­ber 3 from 12:00 p.m. – 12:45 p.m., will be titled “Best Prac­tices for Get­ting the Most out of your Wooden Pal­let: Ways to reduce pal­let dam­age, pal­let oper­a­tion costs, and pallet-related prod­uct dam­age for opti­mal reusable results” and will focus on cap­tive or closed-loop wooden pal­lets. “Many com­pa­nies strug­gle with the dura­bil­ity issue with wood pal­lets. Our goal of this ses­sion is to pro­vide a pre­sen­ta­tion that will shed light on how to make a wooden pal­let the most reusable asset that it can be,” said Callen Cochran, Busi­ness Devel­op­ment Man­ager for the point­GUARD Pal­let Pro­tec­tor. “By part­ner­ing with the CPULD at Vir­ginia Tech, we know that atten­dees of this ses­sion will be given some use­ful strate­gies from an orga­ni­za­tion that is con­sid­ered one of the experts in the pack­ag­ing field.”

Although the pre­sen­ta­tion will be spon­sored by the point­GUARD Pal­let Pro­tec­tor, the ses­sion will be taught by Las­zlo Hor­vath, Direc­tor at the CPULD and Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Prac­tice at the Depart­ment of Sus­tain­able Biomaterials.

In addi­tion to the ses­sion, both UPSI and the CPULD will be oper­at­ing sep­a­rate booths at Pack Expo, which will be held in Chicago’s McCormick Place, Novem­ber 2nd – 5th. The UPSI/pointGUARD booth will be located in Booth 6955 inside the Reusable Pack­ag­ing Pavil­ion and the CPULD Booth 17, will located in the Edu­ca­tion and Work­force Devel­op­ment Pavilion.

CPULD has been eval­u­at­ing pal­lets made of a diverse range of mate­ri­als for more than 40 years, played a role in the devel­op­ment of The Pal­let Design Sys­tem. CPULD has facil­i­tated all of the ASTM and Fas­Track test­ing on the point­GUARD Pal­let Pro­tec­tor prod­ucts and is cur­rently con­duct­ing a prod­uct dam­age analy­sis on the new SP40S point­GUARD. UPSI was started in 1994 when two pal­let com­pa­nies merged to form one of North­ern California’s largest pal­let com­pa­nies.