Pallet cube is a packaging decision

Packaging teams optimise the pack. Logistics teams optimise the route. The number that decides transport emissions sits between them: how much of the trailer is air.

It is nobody's metric, so it is nobody's problem, and it is routinely worth more than the material change everyone is arguing about.

Where the air comes from

Case dimensions that do not tile. A case 8mm too wide gives up a column on every layer. The 8mm came from a corrugator's standard tooling and was never questioned, because it does not show up anywhere except on a pallet plan.

Pallet height set by habit. Many operations stack to a height chosen years ago for a warehouse they have since left. Racking beam heights change; stack heights rarely follow.

Overhang, and the fear of it. Overhang is genuinely bad — it costs compression strength at the corner, which is where a stack carries its load. But the response is usually a conservative underfill applied everywhere rather than a measured one, and the difference across a year of shipments is large.

What we do

We run the pack against the actual trailer and the actual pallet before we discuss material. On one project this was a 4mm case reduction and one extra layer, which took 11% off shipments with no material change, no requalification and no artwork.

The uncomfortable version

If a client is choosing between a material substitution and a pallet study, the pallet study usually wins on both cost and carbon. It is a worse story and a better outcome, and we have lost at least one pitch by saying so in the room.