Slip sheets kept the unit load and threw away the pallet

Wood pallets made bulk handling practical, but they also created their own supply chain: inventory, repair, sanitation, lost assets, empty returns, and dead freight weight.

The slip-sheet answer was almost comically thin. Keep cartons unitized by wrapping or tying them, put the stack on a sheet roughly the footprint of the load, and add lips a forklift attachment can grip.

A 1984 patent described slip sheets as about one-tenth the cost of hardwood pallets, with no return program, far less storage space, and about a twenty-fold saving in freight weight versus shipping wood.

Keep the unit load, delete the platform

It attacked the support layer, not the product stack, so warehouses could still move one load at a time.

The grippable lip turned a flat sheet into a handling interface.

It worked best where both shipper and receiver had the same push-pull equipment, which made the savings a network-design question.

When a standard has two jobs, separate them. The pallet made goods movable and also acted as a platform; the slip sheet kept movability and removed the platform cost.

ISO later documented slip sheets as a pallet-related technical practice. They never killed wooden pallets, because every node needs compatible equipment, but in closed or high-volume lanes they remain a quiet way to buy cube, weight, and pallet-return costs back.