How To Properly and Safely Sanitise Plastic Pallets
01 Mar 2019
Ensuring pallets are cleaned properly can be a fairly simple task. However, ensuring your pallets are sanitised properly can be much trickier. Pallets now come in a variety of shapes and sizes that have many corners and seams that make them very difficult to clean.
One of the main advantages of using pallets is how robust they are. This allows for a more robust cleaning process, which can include jet washing and detergents etc. But what is the optimal way to sanitise your pallets?
Things to Consider
Firstly, it is important to assess your pallets before cleaning them. Proper cleaning is much easier if your pallets don’t have lots of unusual bumps, lumps, chinks and edges.
After you have assessed your pallets, it is then vital to think about what you are cleaning them for. For instance, sanitising, as opposed to cleaning, a food grade plastic pallet entails very different approaches. Sanitising means ensuring that all microorganisms on the pallet are all be completely eradicated. For food products this must be achieved without using harsh chemicals like bleach or other harsh chemicals that may contaminate the products in anyway.
In order to sanitise you pallets correctly it is important to first understand the appropriate sanitising solutions, and have access to the appropriate equipment. The shape and material will determine whether or not it is easier to clean the pallet yourself. For this reason, it can often be much easier for the sanitising process to be left to a third party.
How to Sanitise Plastic Pallets
In order for your pallets to be truly sanitised, two things must be achieved:
- It must be treated with a substance that has been proven to kill a certain percentage of microbial life, within a certain period of time.
- The pallet must also be treated for a prescribed amount of time and cannot in anyway be exposed to microbes after this process.
It is important to remember that if a sanitised pallet is placed in an area that hasn’t been disinfected, the pallet can no longer be considered sanitised. This is one of the main issues businesses and supply chains face when trying to sanitise their pallets themselves.
Of course, you can have the pallets cleaned for you by outsourcing it to companies who specialise in cleaning pallets. By using energy-efficient machines with a much higher capacity, these companies are able to clean, dry and store your pallets much more easily. And, ultimately, deliver a properly sanitised pallet for your company.