Pallet price rise warning

PALLET MANUFACTURERS are facing significant increases in the cost of raw material costs.

These include:

• A depressed construction industry – particularly in the housing building sector – which has seen sawmills cutting back on production and subsequently labour.
• Increased prices charged by Scandinavian mills to counter the previous year’s poor trading.
• Issues with the availability of EU logs due to recent increased felling volumes to combat bark beetle outbreak.
• Lower volumes of Canadian timber as the result of forest fires last year and this, which has had a knock-on effect on supplies from the US. 

TIMCON secretary General Stuart Hex said: “TIMCON's members have reported significant hikes in the price of pallet wood over recent months. The recently published pallet timber index for Q2 shows a further increase of 4.4 per cent for homegrown wood, following on from the 0.3 per cent reported in Q1 – this is the first time we have seen two successive quarters of increase since Q2 2021 and Q3 2021.”