Plastic or Wooden Pallets? The Choice Is Pretty Straightforward

While there is one distinct advantage wooden pallets have over plastic ones – they are biodegradable – there is a whole host of reasons why plastic plastics are, in the long run, preferable to wood when conducting a successful shipping and handling business. One of the chief reasons is durability: to put it simply, plastic pallets can go through a lot more punishment than can wooden ones. Not only is plastic resilient against decomposition, but it’s generally more effective at handling the bumps, bangs, dings, and assorted lacerations that are par for the course in materials handling. Whether you’re running a warehouse operation that provides for a single city, or whether you’re running a long-distance freight truck company that delivers goods to distant States, your best bet for your dollar is going to be in plastic. Generally speaking, plastic pallets have been found to be almost 50 times more durable than their wooden counterparts.

Furthermore, the advantage of a wooden pallet being recyclable gets overwritten by the fact that a plastic pallet can just as easily be recycled. Numerous plastic recycling centers exist in most regions of the United States and southern Canada. These facilities aren’t the type to simply recycle plastic bottles of pop or Poland Spring. They’re fully capable of recycling larger-scale plastic pallets into other, vitally needed products. Not only that, but any company that trades in its plastic waste to one of these recycling centers can make a brisk side-business in terms of cost-savings. And generally speaking, plastic pays higher premiums than does wood or paper.

At Stamar, we not only carry plastic pallets for any variety of application or weight-load, we also are deeply engaged with green recycling. Not only is it cost-effective for our own business, but it’s all part of our strategy to leave less of an industrial footprint from the products we use and supply. To find out more about Stamar’s plastic pallet capabilities, contact us today.

Air Pollution in the Great Indoors

Unless you’re a construction worker or a Park Ranger, chances are that when you work, you work inside either a building or a vehicle. Whether you work in a large commercial office-park or in a century-old (though hopefully updated) assembly plant, you are probably familiar to some extent with the problems and perils presented by indoor air pollution. Air that accumulates and stagnates over the course of a time in one given spot can not only lose some of its breathability, but there’s every chance that hidden pollutants – even trace amounts of them – lurk in various corners of any given workspace or jobsite.

Obvious culprits like oil, gas, kerosene, and coal are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about all the various cleaning products and maintenance procedures that go into upkeep of a facility: all the bathroom cleaners, the spray bottles, the humidifiers, the air conditioners and heaters, and even the dust that gets disturbed by the scuffle of feet or vacuum cleaners – all of it accumulates over time and can generate a lot of problems. In some extreme cases, one might even begin to believe that ongoing maintenance leads to even bigger problems than the short-term solutions it offers, even if a single cleaning by itself is harmless enough. Asthma, pneumonia, and the unseemly phenomenon of humidifier fever can all be contracted through prolonged exposure.

Rip-proof trashcan liners can help
combat contaminant pollution at work.

There are ways, of course, of keeping this all in check. Not only should a building be well-ventilated and consistently updated to conform to current building codes, but managers and workers can take additional steps to prevent indoor air pollution from getting to them. Not only are face-masks a potential source of protecting against the “hazards of the great indoors,” but it’s sometimes good (especially if you work in a factory) to have several large bags of oil dry on hand. Not only that, but certain types of trashcan liners are especially puncture and rip-proof. That way, you’re sure not to get any unnecessary contaminants spoiling your work environment.

Stamar provides many different products in its line-up that let you fight back against air contamination in the interior of a building. Give us a call today; we’re sure to be able to help out.

How to Get the Most Stretch for Your Film

Whoever would have thought that stretch film – that miniscule layer of film that keeps stacked pallets from toppling during warehouse handling and overland transit – would have a total consumption weight of 1 billion pounds per year? Keep in mind that figure accounts for just the United States’ total alone. Given the rising global popularity of stretch film, especially in the newly industrialized nations of Asia, one can only forecast ever more billions of pounds of potential wastage. In sum, all that wafer-thin plastic would require a pretty big wastebasket to fit in.

Part of the reason that so much plastic stretch wrap is used is due to sheer human inefficiency. The typical warehouse day-shift worker will stretch a sheet of film only to 25-50% of its full stretch capacity. Compare this fact to just how far a stretch wrap machine can stretch plastic film around a load of pallets: some machines are in fact capable of stretching well beyond 100% of the theoretical intended amount. If you’re new to buying one of these machines, keep a watchful eye on the web for sales deals at any number of companies, or check out Chicago’s own biannual Pack Expo and meet the manufacturers face-to-face.

The Unseen (But Much Overheard) Problem of Noise Pollution

Deafness isn’t just a problem for aging rock-stars. Every year according to the CDC, 22 million American workers are exposed to hazardous levels of noise when on the job. While musicians form a disproportionately sized slice of the epidemic, other occupations make their numbers seem trite in comparison. Machinists and welders in automotive assembly plants, soldiers overexposed to munitions discharges, miners, steel- and sawmill workers, meat processing plant personnel, and construction workers are just some of the larger demographics who regularly experience hearing impairment on account of their work conditions.



3M Ear Muffs with a
Noise Reduction
Rating of 24dB



But before you scramble to run an online search for hearing aids, consider that hearing-loss prevention might actually be the goal you’re seeking. Hearing loss – particularly in obvious, heavy industrial settings – is a problem that can be anticipated – for the most part – years in advance. It shouldn’t just be that you don earplugs at night when you’re trying to get to sleep to the tune of the neighbor’s dog yapping away. Nor should earplugs serve a specialty purpose and only that, like when you’re on a firing range. The modern world, specifically the modern-urban-industrial daytime world, is rife with noise pollution. To that end, Stamar provides hearing protection devices such as high-grade 3M ear muffs and ear plugs.

Loudness is an essential part of 9 to 5, a necessary evil of the workaday world. But there’s no reason that either you or your company need to grow deafened or defeated by the jobs you have to do.

Plastic Truck Seals Keep Your Supply Chain Safe

It is a staggering amount of money that is lost per annum to cargo theft. Every year, you can count on somewhere between $10 - $30 billion to be stolen from overland big rigs, cargo ships, railroad depots, and highway gas-stations. It’s a sum that dwarfs the GDPs of more than one country on Earth, and it’s a shame that such hard work can be snatched away with such little effort. Oftentimes, all it takes for many thousands of dollars of merchandise to be lost to the wind is one trucker leaving his rig unguarded for a few minutes at an overland truck stop. One unsuspecting bathroom break, or a quick stop for a coffee at the cashier, and suddenly one’s credibility as a trucker lies in jeopardy.

In these trying economic times, we’re sensitive to our customers’ needs when it comes to protecting their goods, as well as their good names. By using the plastic truck seals we provide at Stamar, you can ensure that if theft occurs, that theft will be made instantly apparent. If the seal has been disturbed or broken, more than likely someone has been trying to help themselves to the merchandise in question. Available in yellow, white, blue, red, or green in quantities of one hundred per case, truck seals are an easy way of keeping your overland deliveries safe, on-time, as well as ensuring that those companies whose goods you’re delivering place that much further trust in you.

Keep your eyes on the road, and let Stamar do the rest.

Stamar: Working Towards an Injury-Free Workplace

According to the Worldwide Cleaning Industry Association (ISSA), the number of work-related injuries per year in the United States runs into the many thousands. Of these injuries, a disproportionate number happen at warehouses and materials handling facilities. Whether that figure is due more to the negligence of workers or of management is a moot point. The essential thing is that these sorts of statistics – year after year – are simply unacceptable since they are mostly preventable; or if not entirely preventable, then at least are able to be mitigated. To that effort, ISSA and OSHA combined to release a comprehensive series of guidelines on how best to implement – and follow through with – warehouse safety. Every major warehouse-related activity that involves significant risk – forklift safety, manual lifting and materials handling, loading docks, conveyors, and workplace trips and falls – is covered clearly and effectively.

Let’s face it, accidents can and will happen. But in an accident-prone workplace, if you see where the problems are occurring, you can use these guidelines to begin making changes. Some of those changes necessarily involve getting the right gear. Safety glasses, hard hats, first aid kits, ear plug dispensers, lifting gloves, and fall protection harnesses are all essential items in any warehouse operation that keep the bad from becoming worse. All these things are items we stock here at Stamar. Since is safe workplace is always a more productive one, it makes strategic sense to place a long-term importance on building an inventory of safety protection equipment. We’re glad to help spread the word, and glad to do our part in keeping our nation’s workers healthy and well-protected.

Our Document Management System Just Got Leaner and Greener

Have you ever been to a restaurant where the waiter accidentally misheard your order, or the chef accidentally didn’t hear the waiter said and as a result cooked the wrong dish? Would you ever want to go back to a restaurant like that? That’s the experience many people have when it comes to dealing with many types of business: somewhere along the chain of communication, something gets lost in translation, and chaos asserts itself. 

At Stamar we believe that orderliness of service is a customer right, not a privilege. In an effort to streamline our turnkey interactions with online customers – keeping them informed of the status of a particular order from the time they make it until the moment they receive the final shipment – we’ve begun implementing Zetadocs.

Zetadocs is a useful tool for any company that prides itself on having greater orderliness, not to mention having less of a carbon footprint. When a customer’s order request finds its way to our inbox, Zetadocs allows us automatically to transcribe the order’s specifics into one standardized format. From purchase order, to warehouse pick ticket, to shipment order, to delivery number – Zetadocs is a convenient (some might nearly say flawless) way for customer and manufacturer “to be on the same page” throughout the course of a particular order. 

Furthermore, in keeping with our ethos of being a greener company, our use of Zetadocs eliminates a huge amount of paper. For example, fax orders via Zetadocs get transcribed onto a computer screen – there’s no printing involved. Wastage and redundancy are things of the past, as are any possibilities for error.