Why a receiver rejects a pallet, and what restacking actually fixes

The reasons a pallet gets refused, in rough order of frequency

Too tall. Almost every large receiver publishes a maximum pallet height, and it is usually lower than the height a container was packed to. A load built to fill a box is frequently built past what a distribution centre will accept.

Overhang. Cartons hanging past the edge of the pallet get crushed by racking, by other pallets and by forklifts, so receivers refuse them on sight. It is also the most common thing to find after a long ocean voyage, because a load settles.

Wrong pallet. The wrong footprint, a broken stringer, a pallet that will not take a forklift from all four sides, or for anything moving internationally, wood without an ISPM 15 stamp.

Labels in the wrong place, or buried. A pallet whose labels face inward is a pallet a receiver cannot scan without unwrapping it, and unwrapping it is not their job.

Mixed contents where the receiver expected a single item, or a single item where they expected mixed. This one is a routing guide problem and it is entirely avoidable by reading the routing guide.

What restacking is, and what it is not

Restacking is taking a load apart and rebuilding it to a spec: a different height, a different pattern, a different pallet, square edges, rewrapped, relabelled where the labels need to face.

It is not repair. If cartons are crushed, restacking rebuilds the pallet around the damage rather than undoing it, and what is damaged gets photographed and set aside rather than quietly buried in the middle of a rebuilt stack. A rebuild that hides damage is a claim somebody else discovers later.

The trade calls it restacking and it also calls it pallet rework, and they are the same job. If a quote uses one word and a receiver uses the other, nothing different is being described.

The wood rule that follows the pallet, not the freight

Any wood packaging in international trade has to be heat treated and stamped under ISPM 15, and the United States names the parts explicitly in its own regulation: dunnage, crating, pallets, packing blocks, drums, cases and skids.

So a load restacked onto raw wooden pallets for an export move is not compliant, whatever was true of the pallets it came in on. The clean answer is stamped wood, or processed board such as plywood or OSB, which the standard exempts because glue and heat and pressure do not carry the pests raw timber does.

Treatment has to happen before the wood is packed. It cannot be fixed at the terminal, and an inspector at a border may order non-compliant packaging straight back out.

When to restack, and where

The cheapest moment is while the freight is already being handled. A container being devanned is a load already in pieces; building it onto the right pallets then costs a fraction of doing it later as its own job.

The most expensive moment is after a rejection, because by then you have paid for a truck to go, a truck to come back, and a redelivery, and possibly a chargeback on top.

The way to avoid both is to get the receiver's spec before the freight arrives. A routing guide is a boring document that answers almost every question above in advance, and the number of loads refused for something written on page four of it is not small.

If the container opens and the pallets are leaning

It happens after a long voyage. The doors open, the pallets have shifted, the bottom cartons are crushed and the whole load leans. A large receiver will refuse it at the dock.

Bring it to us before it goes there. We unload it, set aside and photograph what is damaged, rebuild the rest onto good pallets to the receiver's height and rules, wrap it, and put the labels where they can be scanned. Then it goes out as freight the receiver will accept.

Send us the receiver's routing guide, or at least their pallet height and label rules, before the container arrives. That is the difference between doing the job once and doing it twice.