Two benefits that can be achieved by slipsheeted materials handling are reduction in handling costs and also costs of product shipping damage, as the Toro Company has found when they started shipping their walk‐type power lawn movers in stretch‐wrapped slipsheeted loads. Costs of product shipping damage actually fell by a huge 80%.

Although General Foods Corporation in the U.S. has traditionally been using palletised shipping successfully in the early years of their introduction, it was found that the quality of the wooden pallets began to deteriorate as shipping volumes grew and the pallet exchange pool expanded to include more and more of other shippers and customers. According to C. W. Ebeling [*], it also became more and more difficult to obtain good hardwood pallets to the original specifications established for the program and it became virtually impossible to keep up with pallet repairs.

Air transportation of goods around the world offers fast turnaround for products for which speed of distribution and ground inventory reduction is important. But, compared to an ocean‐going container vessel, space on a cargo plane is limited no matter how big the plane is.

World trade has grown since ancient times. Today, containers and container ships are constantly being produced to handle the enormous quantities of goods that are shipped across borders.

Containerisation has been instrumental in improving the rates and volumes of the movement of goods. Yet simple measures can be implemented to increase the efficiency of the transportation of goods using containers.