Why pallets collapse in transit (and what it really costs)

A pallet leaves the wrapper as one block and arrives at the customer as a stack of separate cartons. Nothing dramatic has to happen in between. A hard stop at a roundabout, a lane change, a bad expansion joint, a tail-lift — each one asks the load to move, and the only thing telling it not to is the film around it.

The failure is almost always progressive. The top layers travel a few millimetres forward under braking and come back slightly short. Repeat that for three hundred miles and the stack develops a lean. Once the centre of gravity sits outside the pallet footprint, the next roundabout finishes the job. The driver opens the doors on a load that was fine when he closed them.

Unreinforced film yields. Put it under sustained load and it keeps stretching — slowly, quietly, for the whole journey — and every millimetre it gives back is containment force it is no longer applying. The pallet was tight in the yard and slack when it reached the customer. Nobody sees the moment it happened.

The second failure is mechanical. A forklift tine, a sharp pallet corner or a protruding edge punctures the wrap, and unreinforced film unzips from the hole: one puncture at the base takes out the turns above it. Loads with sharp corners or open gaps do this repeatedly.

The third is simply not enough turns at the base. If the bottom layer is never tied to the pallet itself, the whole stack can slide across the deck boards while the wrap stays perfectly intact around it. The film is not what failed there; the wrap pattern is.

The instinct after a collapse is to buy thicker film. Toreto's own comparative wrap tests, run in August 2026 on the same pallet and the same machine at the same power stretch and tension settings, say that is the wrong lever. Solid film at 23µ, 20µ and 17µ held the load at 9.9 kg/sq in in all three cases. Six microns of thickness changed the holding by nothing at all.

What did change was the plastic consumed: 200 g, then 174 g, then 140 g a pallet. And when buyers go the other way to save money, 12µ nano film on its own held 7.6 kg/sq in — the weakest result in the whole test. Supersonic and Aerosonic at 16µ held 10 kg/sq in on 66 g. Costs in those tests are approximate and vary with film price and pallet size.

Film is the cheapest thing on a pallet. In Toreto's tests the cost to wrap came out at roughly €0.48 a pallet with 23µ solid film and €0.32 with Supersonic. The goods sitting on top cost orders of magnitude more, and a collapse rarely damages a single carton.

Then comes everything the damage triggers. The load is rebuilt and rewrapped in the bay, or refused at the door and sent back. A delivery slot is lost. Someone raises a credit note, someone else investigates the claim, and a customer let down twice starts asking a second supplier for a price.

Against that, the difference between films is small and entirely knowable. Sixteen cents a pallet, the gap between those two rows of the test, is €16,000 across 100,000 pallets — before a single damaged load is counted. Put your own annual volume in; the arithmetic does not change.

Most pallets that fail were wrapped by someone in a hurry. Toreto's application guide for its reinforced films is deliberately short: two revolutions at the base to tie the load to the pallet, one spiral up with 20–30 mm overlap, two revolutions at the top, and the inside face of the film against the goods because it grips better. Tension enough to secure the load fully, not so much that the wrap crushes what is inside it.

Heavy, slippery or unstable loads get one more step: spiral back down to the pallet. The criss-cross that creates is what stops layers sliding on one another, and on a load of drums, sacks or polished cartons it is the difference between arriving square and arriving leaning. It costs seconds.

Hand-wrapped pallets also fail more often at the end of a shift than at the start, because a tired operator walks fewer turns and pulls less tension. That is a consistency problem, not a film problem, and it is why Toreto sells the Hyper Wrap System — a dispenser frame and its Hypersonic Efficiency Film together — to operations that wrap by hand.

Wrapping more is the expensive answer: more film, more machine time, fewer pallets a shift. The engineered answer is to take the containment out of the structure of the film instead of out of extra revolutions. Supersonic is reinforced — banded “Tiger” film — and secures a load in roughly half the wraps, which is why the same wrapper put out twice as many pallets in Toreto's test.

If the load also sweats — anything warm, fresh, frozen or hot-filled — Aerosonic is the macroperforated version of the same material and performs the same, so you can switch between them at the same cost per pallet and on unchanged machine settings.

Before changing anything, measure. Wrap the same pallet with your current film and with a candidate, on the same machine at the same settings, weigh the film that went on and check how hard the wrap is holding. One afternoon of that tells you more than any roll price.