Ubiquitous in hipster bedrooms and warehouses across the EU alike, the Euro-pallet seems to be to be one of the most common, and undervalued, aspects of standardisation across the European Common Market. But as with every single thing EU, I imagine a lot of work was spent in actually making this thing come to pass. Is that true? Or did everyone agree that it would be useful and it happened without a lot of fuss?
I imagine a lot of work was spent in actually making this thing come to pass.
Perhaps not as much as you'd think, and a lot of it comes down to what is more or less historical coincidences. I'd argue the real achievement of the EUR pallet though isn't so much the pallet itself, as much as it is the system for pallet pooling - you can trade EUR pallets like for like, eliminating the need to bill separately for packing materials. So, the pallets are fungible almost like a currency, and as such they circulate all over Europe wherever transports happen to take them. Nobody wants to get broken or substandard pallets dumped on them though, so there's a great deal of bureaucracy surrounding certification of pallets and pallet manufacturing, which also means there's a market for counterfeit pallets...
That aside, Europeans were introduced to both pallets and the vehicle that made them really useful (the forklift) primarily via the US armed forces during WW2. The US Quartermaster Corps was the organization that first demonstrated palletization on a large scale, and they were also the first to standardize pallet sizes. Much of the early standardization work was done at the US Navy Ordnance Materials Handling Laboratory in Hingham, Massachusetts. There were people in the US that saw the potential of a standardized pallet pooling system even during the war, see e.g. these two articles by Matthew W. Potts, but these ideas didn't get much traction in the US outside of the military.
After the war, large amounts of American surplus equipment was left readily available for cheap in Europe, and the palletization pooling idea was picked up there instead. The first large scale adoption came in Sweden, where a couple of different interests happened to align to create a suitable environment for pallet standardization and pooling. Swedish industry was undamaged by the war and there was a large pent-up demand for imported consumer goods. One very early pallet adopter was a refrigerated warehouse in the port of Helsingborg, which had purchased an American surplus forklift in 1946 but didn't have a lot of pallets for it. To solve that problem they contracted their local supplier of wooden crates and the like (a company called Gyllsjö Träindustri AB) to build them some. Forklifts and pallets caught on rapidly in Sweden, especially in groceries distribution, where the Federation of Consumer Co-operatives (Kooperativa Förbundet, KF, today best known to the public through the grocery retail chain Coop) was another early adopter. By 1949 this trend had spread far enough that the Swedish state railways (SJ) was in talks with Gyllsjö (who had rapidly pivoted their business towards pallet manufacturing) and local newly established forklift reseller and later manufacturer BT (owned by KF) to agree on a standardized pallet that could be pooled within Sweden.
The result of this standardization effort was a 800x1200mm pallet that is effectively identical to the modern EUR pallet, and even today the EUR pallet is occasionally referred to as an "SJ pallet" in Sweden. The size is somewhat arbitrary but was almost certainly influenced both by American pallet and forklift sizes and by European railway cargo wagon sizes. 800x1200mm is almost 32x48 inches, and while the US Quartermaster Corps didn't have a pallet that size, 32x40" and 48x48" were both common. 800mm is narrow enough to fit through many ordinary doorways, which was probably an important concern because early Swedish pallet usage was primarily focused on small scale retail use, and it's also narrow enough to fit three pallets wide in an ordinary 2.6 meter wide European railway car with some room to spare.
This Swedish standard pallet ended up getting adopted by the International Union of Railways (UIC) as a European standard that went into force on July 1st 1961, but the road there is less clear to me than the origins of the pallet itself. I've read some people claiming that one influential factor was that the French railways happened to import a lot of Swedish standard pallets in the 1950's which made this particular pallet pretty widespread, but the sourcing for this is unreliable at best. There was apparently a competing Swiss standard that was more similar to the US pallets, but I don't know anything more. I would love to hear more about how the pooling system became adopted across Europe.
EURO fork lifts can lift American pallets, and vice versa, but EURO floor jacks can't lift American pallets as they have cross braces on the bottom which EURO pallets don't have. It's too bad they didn't standarize the pallets for use on both side of the Atlantic. To unload a container of American pallets in Europe, you have to have imported American floor jacks to use on the American pallets.