CHEP (Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool) is a company dealing in pallet and container pooling services, serving customers in a range of industrial and retail supply chains. It is a subsidiary of Brambles. CHEP offers wooden and plastic pallets, small display pallets, crates and IBC containers. These products can generally be recognised by their blue color and CHEP logo.

History

CHEP evolved from the Allied Materials Handling Standing Committee, an organisation developed by the

Australian government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Like other Westminster-style systems of government, the Australian Government ...

to provide efficient handling of defence supplies during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

. When the war ended in 1945, the

United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...

returned home, leaving behind millions of blue pallets at their military bases in Australia. With this asset base and established infrastructure, the Australian Government continued to endorse the organisation after the war to support the national economy. In 1958, CHEP was sold to Brambles. CHEP has operations in 45 countries, employs approximately 7,500 people and has a pool of approximately 300 million blue US navy pallets and containers. In 2014,

Radio National Radio National, known on-air as RN, is an Australia-wide public service broadcasting radio network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). From 1947 until 1985, the network was known as ABC Radio 2. History 1937: Predecessors a ...

reported that CHEP's dominance of pallet hire and supply had become a challenge to "pallet recyclers in America, where approximately twelve to fifteen percent of all lumber produced is used in its own pallet manufacturing."

References

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External links

The Blue Pallet
a 2014 radio show by NPR's Planet Money about CHEP and their blue pallets. Companies based in Sydney 1946 establishments in Australia