What are our cardboard pallets?

What is a cardboard pallet?

A cardboard pallet is a paper honeycomb pallet used in place of timber or plastic. It is a fraction of the weight and exempt from ISPM15 heat treatment because it is not wood. Standard 1200 × 1000mm and 1200 × 800mm footprints are available, but a cardboard pallet is made to the footprint of the load — which is where the cost advantage sits.

Cardboard pallet sizes: standard footprints, and why bespoke costs less

Most pallet buyers start by asking which standard size we stock. It is the right question for timber, and the wrong one for honeycomb.

The standard footprints

We can make the sizes you already run. A Dufaylite cardboard pallet is available at 1200 × 1000mm and 1200 × 800mm — the same footprints as the conventional pallets already moving through your operation, so nothing changes on the racking, the truck bed or the handling equipment.

Why a bespoke footprint is usually cheaper

This is the opposite of how bespoke normally works, so it is worth sitting with.

A timber or plastic pallet comes in a fixed size, and your product has to fit it. If your load is 950 × 740mm, you buy a 1200 × 1000mm pallet and pay to ship the difference — on every consignment, for the life of the product. You are paying for pallet you do not use, and freight on the air around it.

A honeycomb pallet is engineered to the footprint of the load. The pallet is the size of the product, so there is no wasted deck, no wasted cube in the trailer and no wasted material in the pallet itself. On a repeating shipment that is a structural saving rather than a one-off.

How a bespoke pallet is specified

Send us the footprint of your load, its weight, how it is handled, and roughly how many you ship a year. We engineer the deck and feet to suit, and prove it before you commit to a run. Talk to our packaging team to start that conversation.

Cardboard pallets vs wood pallets

Three things separate a paper honeycomb pallet from the timber and plastic pallets most operations run today: how it crosses a border, what it weighs, and whether it is built to your load or to somebody else’s standard.

The export argument

This is the one that decides it for most buyers. Wood packaging moving across borders has to be heat treated and marked to ISPM15. Paper pallets are not wood, so the requirement does not apply — no treatment cost, no certification lead time, and no consignment held at a border over a missing stamp. If you are shipping overseas, that alone often settles the specification.

The freight argument

A lighter pallet means less paid weight on every consignment. Combine that with a footprint built to the load rather than to a standard, and the saving repeats on every shipment you make. Honeycomb pallets sit naturally alongside the rest of a paper-based load: corner protection at the edges, void fill for stability, and a paper pallet underneath, all going into the same recycling stream at the far end. Our transit packaging team specifies the whole load rather than one component of it.

The practical differences

• No nails, no splinters, no fumigation — safer to handle and cleaner in food and pharmaceutical environments.
• Keep it dry — honeycomb pallets are designed for enclosed transit and storage, not for an outdoor yard.
• One-way shipping — no pallet pool to manage, no returns to chase, no deposit to reconcile.
• Standard paper recycling at end of life, rather than waste wood or a specialist plastics stream.

What does a cardboard pallet cost?

There is no list price, because a honeycomb pallet is made to your load rather than pulled off a rack — and quoting a per-unit figure without knowing the footprint would be meaningless.

What moves the price

• Footprint and load — the size of the deck and how the feet are engineered.
• Deck construction — how much board the load actually needs.
• Annual volume — as with any manufactured item, volume moves the unit price.

What moves the total cost the other way

• No ISPM15 treatment on export consignments.
• Lower freight weight on every shipment.
• No pallet return logistics — one-way shipping without a pallet pool to manage.
• Lower EPR liability, because paper rates Green under the Recyclability Assessment Methodology.

Comparing a cardboard pallet on unit price against a timber pallet misses most of that. The number worth comparing is the cost of getting one load from your floor to your customer’s.

Made in St Neots by the UK’s only paper honeycomb manufacturer

Most companies selling paper honeycomb pallets in the UK are converters or importers. A converter buys honeycomb core from someone else, laminates the facings onto it, then cuts the parts. An importer brings finished board in and cuts it up. Dufaylite manufactures the paper honeycomb itself, in St Neots, and has done since 1955.

That matters in three practical ways. Lead times are shorter, because the material is made on site rather than ordered in. Specification is genuinely open — cell size, board thickness and deck construction are all ours to change, not a supplier’s. And supply is UK-based, with no import lead time or border exposure.

Every pallet is FSC certified (C186880), made by a Carbon Neutral Britain™ certified business, under ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, with a water-based, VOC-free, PFAS-free adhesive.