Global shipping — ground, ocean, or air — is an infinitely complex machine with countless moving parts. But one thing, at least, is fairly straightforward: You can't transport much if you don't have a pallet.
Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians devised the first pallets, also called skids, to store and transport trade goods and other materials. The design was simple: A wood platform with nothing underneath. Rudimentary, but so effective that it went largely unchanged for centuries. But by the 1920s, the pallet needed an upgrade, and the patented "lift truck platform," which added two support boards to lift the platform off the ground, was introduced. The 1930s and 1940s brought more innovations — adding a bottom platform to enhance the platform's stability and make them easier for machines to lift, and the introduction of a standard size to improve supply chain efficiency during World War II.
The design has remained largely the same since the 1940s, though the materials have changed as manufacturers adopt more sustainable practices. These days, pallets cost around $20 apiece, and their simple construction makes them easily resold or otherwise repurposed.
And that's a problem. The world's largest pallet supplier, Brambles, owns hundreds of millions of pallets, which, when they go missing, can blow a hole in the company balance sheet. To stem the losses, Brambles has affixed $60 GPS trackers to nearly half a million of its blue-painted pallets. Brambles also employs a team of "pallet detectives" to track down missing pallets — whether they're being used to transport illicit drugs or living a second life as someone's trendy coffee table.