Food Safety Pallet Wars: Wood vs. Plastic

An estimated 1.2 billion pallets are in use in the United States and for the 60 years since the pallet's formal debut, safety issues have been minimal. But in the last few months, pallet industry leaders have been caught up in a brewing war over consumer safety – a war between plastic and wood.

Both point to studies, or potential hazards caused by the rival plastic or wood.

Plastic pallet distributer intelligent Global Pooling Systems, or iGPS, threw a recent punch this January when the company released results of a multi-city survey that found E. coli, Listeria and Salmonella growing on wooden pallets.

"In New Orleans, Louisiana, 43 percent of the pallets came back positive with E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria," said Bob Moore, CEO and chairman of iGPS.

The samples from 30 pallets in New Orleans were paid for by iGPS and sent to independent labs. Other cities in the iGPS-sponsored survey included Maine, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Moore is arguing that the same contamination that his company found on wooden pallets in fish markets in New Orleans is less likely to show up on his plastic pallets.

But the president of the National Wooden Pallet & Container Association argues the iGPS testing doesn't say much about the wooden pallets versus plastic pallets debate, since the company didn't include samples from plastic pallets in its investigation.

"The question is, are these random pallets or are they specifically targeted pallets?" said Bruce Scholnick, president of the National Wooden Pallet & Container Association. "I could go out and find a [any] pallet that's been sitting outside for 6 months or a year that has waste on it, animal waste and I could send it to a lab," he said.

Trevor Suslow, a research specialist in food safety at the University of California, Davis, said he's not surprised by the high-stakes back and forth between the plastic and wooden pallet industry. "It's a big market. No wonder they fight about it," Suslow said.

However, as the worries for contaminating produce go, Suslow said pallets have worked well enough that they do not cause a great deal of worry. "In the hierarchy of things to worry about, it's not on the top of the list, because the product is not loaded directly on the pallet," Suslow said.

Source: ABC News/Lauren Cox. Read the full story.