Australia turned abandoned pallets into a shared rental pool

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 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.

Pooled abandoned pallets into a shared rental fleet: companies borrowed for a shipment and returned them, so one central set served many at far higher utilization.

Individual pallet fleets sit idle most of the time, wasting capital and storage.

Pooling lets one pallet serve many companies' shipments in sequence, raising utilization.

Central ownership enables efficient tracking, repair, and repositioning at scale.

Rental converts fixed capital cost into variable cost tied to actual use.

If equipment is standardized and used intermittently, consider pooling it as a shared rental instead of forcing each company to own its own idle fleet.

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.