I’ve seen the same or even worse. Pallets of stuff would be received, all wrapped up tight in an ungodly amount of plastic. The pallet would be unwrapped, plastic discarded and the contents scanned to confirm the correct items and number of items were present on the pallet. After each item was scanned and it’s serial number recorded, someone would go to validate the items. When validated and found to be correct, the items were again stacked on a pallet and wrapped by another ungodly amount of plastic. The terrible thing was, as I was outside of the distribution chain, I had a view on the bigger picture. Items would often go through several of these places, each doing the exact same. The amounts of plastic each item consumed in the process was huge. But it was necessary, errors were found often, so the steps needed to be done. And the pallets could often get wet, nobody would accept soggy cardboard, so it needed to be wrapped.

The issue is plastic is basically free and extremely good at what it does. A more permanent solution like encasing the goods in some other material, like wood or metal would be more expensive and do a worse job. It’s similar to asbestos, where the solution is so good, nothing else can compete. It took a mighty effort and strict laws to mostly abandon asbestos. I fear humanity has lost its will to live and won’t have it in us to ban single-use plastic.

Some places did use metal trollies instead of pallets, but the pallets were never really a problem. They were almost always made from sustainable woods, be re-used often, till they just about fell apart. After which they were sent out for recycling, either back into a refurbished pallet, or a stamped recycled wood pallet or other recycled wood product.