Styrofoam packaging has been the industry standard of packaging and shipping natural stone tile for many years. Thirty years ago no one really understood the negative impact of Styrofoam but today we know better. To learn more click here. Over the last 2 years we have succeeded in converting over 95% of our stone tile suppliers from Styrofoam to cardboard and in many cases post consumer recycled cardboard.
LVS imports over 200,000 pallets of tile and stone each year. We have succeeded in converting over 90% of our suppliers to change from industry standard wood crates to more environmentally palletized packaging. In the process, LVS has been able to reduce wood usage by over 70% per pallet, and increase the total square footage per pallet, in the process saving thousands of trees annually.
With 100's of thousands of pallets coming and going annually, though used several times, most eventually end up at a landfill. When we designed the new pallets for our vendors, we designed them in such a way that a single 40" x 36" pallet can be reused as is or cut down into four 20" x 18" or two 40" x 18" pallets which then can be used when shipping smaller orders. Shipping thousands of small orders every month that don't require a regular sized pallet, we now get up to four times the use from a single pallet.