#215 1946 · Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool (CHEP) · Logistics / supply chain infrastructurebuy-the-mispriced
The US Army left 60,000 pallets behind in Australia, and instead of scrapping them the government rented them out forever
the problem
Every company that shipped goods on standardized pallets needed to own and store a fleet of them, an idle capital cost none could avoid alone
background
When the US Army withdrew from its Australian bases at the end of WWII, it left behind roughly 60,000 standardized wooden pallets and associated handling equipment including forklifts and cranes, assets built for wartime logistics that had no obvious postwar owner or purpose. The standard fate for military surplus of this kind was auction, salvage, or slow disposal — treating it as scrap value to be liquidated, not infrastructure to be kept running.
Every Australian company that wanted to ship goods efficiently on standardized pallets otherwise faced the same unavoidable cost: buying, storing, tracking and eventually replacing its own pallet fleet, a fixed capital and warehouse-space burden that scaled with a company's shipping volume but sat mostly idle whenever pallets weren't actively in transit.
the move
The Australian government, building on wartime logistics infrastructure it already ran through the Allied Materials Handling Standing Committee, pooled the abandoned pallets into the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool: companies borrowed standardized pallets for a shipment and returned them afterward instead of buying and warehousing their own, with CHEP owning, tracking, repairing and repositioning the shared fleet centrally. The government privatized the operation in 1949 and sold it to logistics company Brambles in 1958, which scaled the pooling model internationally.
the payoff
Under Brambles, CHEP became the largest pallet and container pool in the Southern Hemisphere within years of the sale and expanded into 14 countries by 1991; today CHEP-branded pooling operates in roughly 45-60 countries with a fleet on the order of 300-350 million pallets, crates and containers.
what came after
CHEP is credited as the first formal pallet-pooling system in the world, and the pooled-equipment rental model it pioneered — shared, returnable, centrally maintained standardized assets instead of every company owning its own — became the template for equipment pooling across logistics, retail and manufacturing supply chains globally.
references
- [1]CHEPWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]Our HistoryCHEP, 2025chep.com