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.