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  • Writer's pictureMaryland Forests

Did you know that pallets move the world, and they are being produced here in Maryland?

Updated: May 23, 2022


Meet Don Beazley, Owner of Polo Pallet and Mill Creek Lumber in Cecil County, MD

 

When you’re picking up something you need from the center aisle of your local store, the

pallet that sits beneath it is an afterthought. However, as Polo Pallet owner Don Beazley knows,

“pallets move the world.”


For 15 years, Polo’s 12,000-square-foot facility in Cecil County’s Elkton has turned logs

into a forestry product that provides the foundation for how goods are moved across this country

and the world, from port to truck to warehouse to store. Whether made of mixed hardwoods or

yellow pine, Polo pallets offer a resting place for all our consumer products and make for easy

transportation of a long line of goods.


The previous owner of the company would buy pre-cut wood, but Beazley pretty

quickly figured out to be successful he had to take better hold of his supply chain and “take a

little bit more command of my lumber.” He gradually worked up to the sawmill he owns now, Mill

Creek Lumber, starting with a small Wood Mizer mill and then a portable circle mill. “In order to

meet the production level, we needed to keep upgrading,” Beazley notes.


“It’s not a whole lot to pallets, it’s just lumber nailed together, but without the lumber,

you’re not going to get anywhere,” he adds. Before long, instead of being dependent on lumber

from other people, they started to generate all their lumber right there on site. “So now we don’t

buy any lumber, we just buy in logs, everything milled there and built there,” says Beazley. Logs are

mostly sourced from Laird Logs, a fellow MFA Faces of Forestry profile, that buys high-quality

logs for veneer and export and sells the sawlogs to places like Mill Creek Lumber.


Polo pallets are designed by Beazley’s daughter, Julianna, using software created by

Virginia Tech professor Mark White. It’s a family affair through and through, with his wife

handling all the scheduling for their work crews. His daughter handles all other administrative

duties for the company. The sawmill also produces shoring lumber and has provided some oddly specific

cuts for customers, like a U.S. naval weapons base in New Jersey seeking new decking for a fleet

of 5,000 train cars. “There can be some unique things you’re cutting for,” Beazley says


The Polo manufacturing site is home to a wood waste recycling yard, the only permitted

facility in Cecil County for the past 12 years. Reynolds Recycling rents a portion of Polo’s land

and uses a grinder to turn wood waste at the site into mulch, which Reynolds sells themselves.

Beazley gets involved come inspection time and is glad to know that their wood waste is “taken

care of in-house.” “As far as doing it legally and doing it right, we’re the only ones in Cecil

County right now that’s doing it right, besides going to the landfill and paying $80 a ton to dump

their wood waste,” Beazley points out.


The pallet manufacturer’s production always changes depending on how busy they are.

“We probably do 2,000 to 2,500 pallets a week on average. We probably use 35,000 to 40,000

board feet a week that we cut and goes right into the pallets,” he says. When it comes to

customers, since Polo is the only pallet manufacturer in the region, they have a core group of 4-5

customers spanning a wide range of industries and don’t have to ship their product very far.


However, the eventual overseas path of some of those pallets requires a heat treatment to

prevent the spread of diseases or invasive forest insect pests. Polo is one of the very rare facilities

equipped to do that. “We have a small kiln that can fit 400 pallets in there at a time,” says

Beazley. This heat treatment of pallets and/or crates is done to comply with the International

Plant Protection Committee's ISPM 15: Guidelines for Regulating Wood Packaging Material in

International Trade and is inspected by a third party, TPI.


Beazley is in the midst of working on a whole other level of forestry product shipping,

and it’s a venture that could have dramatic ramifications for the global lumber trade. Through a

partnership with the MD Department of Natural Resources MD Forest Service, Upper Shore

Regional Council, and VA Tech, a study of commercial-size heat treatment unit for logs to be

cleared for overseas export to the E.U. has finally gotten off the ground after four years of

endless meetings and analysis. Beazley and partners are now waiting for the E.U. response after

they examine the logs that have been heat-treated and shipped abroad.


“We need wood products,” Beazley explains. Forestry markets and building the industry

are at the heart of it all for Don Beazley, and the push for expansion locally and globally for

wood products — from logs to pallets to wood chips — is something he looks forward to

continuing.

 


Pictured above: Don Beazley and his daughter Julianna


Photo Credit: EDWIN REMSBERG PHOTOGRAPHS

Project Support: RURAL MARYLAND COUNCIL



 

LINKS TO LEARN MORE:

Delmarva Farmer Article- Treatment Process Opens New Market

Upper Shore Regional Council

Timber Products Inspection Bureau

Maryland's Forests- Great for the Environment and the Economy

Why Join MFA?

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Pictures of representatives from Maryland DNR, USDA APHIS, and VT Tech collaborating on the new steam vacuum technology testing at Polo Pallet.

 



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