In 2004, two young businessmen, Jesse Sels and Sylvain Naets, started Contraload, the first entirely plastic pallet pool. Their idea: Contraload provides its customers with high-quality plastic pallets in Euro dimensions or industrial sizes as required. The client sends the loaded pallet to its customer, Contraload retrieves the empty pallet there, has it cleaned in the nearest contracted cleaning facility, and brings it to the next client who needs it, who then reloads the pallet and sends it on to its own customer.
There are a total of 700,000 plastic carriers circulating in Europe that way, including plastic pallets, IBCs, small and large containers, and tanks – more than three million circuits are organized each year in a highly efficient and sophisticated pool-balancing system.
Each month, trucks are rolling in Europe with more than 1000 transport orders for Contraload pallets. In addition to the Benelux countries, France, Spain, Italy, England and Germany are among the major destinations. Here cost efficiency is just as important as low-emission performance meeting the business requirement for environmentally sound logistics – and of course of the customers.
The big names on the list of customers, such as Unilever and Nestlé, themselves strive heavily for a positive eco-balance. That is because it can reduce costs and improve the image of the brand. "In the end," the green logistician says, "we offer our customers a transparent way to comprehensibly improve their own company's CO2 balance."
