The corrugated plastic sheet can be very strong when oriented correctly. It is easy to cut and can be folded easily parallel to the corrugation. You could make square or rectangular pillars. For extra strength you can add more verticals inside the shapes.
Can be spray painted with plastic safe paints.
The simplest strength multiplier can just be to fold a zigzag and place it inside the square pillar.
All depends on how much weight is involved and amount of diy engineering you get up to.
You can buy milk crates via amazon.
RV owners often use levelng blocks.
Fair enough.
I will note that you probably don’t want ones that were actually used and reused to transport milk, anyways. They stink.
At my store, the milk man collects the empty crates, but he’s not counting them and IME, really doesn’t care (if he even notices) if he doesn’t get them all back.
As for them being dirty, yes, some of them are filthy. Old milk, crud from the ground or the floor of the truck that collects on them, I’ve even had some that were covered in grease (like, a lot of grease, like something somewhere broke and splooged a bunch of axle grease on them).
But it’s trivial to pick out the clean, new ones. Plus being nothing but plastic, you can just hose them off.
Side note: When I got my previous car, the first day I had it I brought some milk home from work. I put the milk on the passenger seat, like I had done a thousand times before, but this time it left a milk crate shaped stain on the fabric. Presumably the crate was dirty, transferred the pattern to the bottom of the milk container which ‘stamped’ it on the seat. Three years of people sitting there and me occasionally making a half-assed attempt to clean it and it still looked like the day it happened. Now I put my milk in a bag, every time.
And as a side note, when you’re done using milk crates, I always suggest people just add them to the pile you’ll usually find behind a store/gas station that sells milk and their milk man will grab them next time they deliver milk.
You can easily wash them in soap and warm water. Voila!
I find this weird in a country where hygiene seems to be taken pretty seriously, I visited a milk distributor not so long ago and saw the returned crates coming off a truck and straight into a washer.
RV leveling blocks might work for you. Walmart has them and they’re definitely strong (we’re sitting on a pair right now – supporting about 8000 lbs if my math is right).
Not sure how you define cheap though. About $30 for a set of 10, IIRC. But they’re wide and very sturdy, and would yield very stable shelves.
Missed edit window I think but…
Just compared a vertical book to a stack of the above blocks and I retract my idea. Strong yes, but would take a lot of them. Cheaper to buy fancy shelves than my suggestion. Sorry.
How about using books? You can go to a local library’s used book sale and hand-select a boatload of appropriate books for cheap.
mmm
ETA: Go on the last day of the sale, the books are usually marked down.
IME (which includes multiple Serv Safe classes and food handling certificates), off the top of my head, I can’t think of many times where sanitation comes into play WRT things that won’t be directly in contact with Ready-To-Eat food.
I can only guess that either they don’t all get washed every time or washing them simply isn’t something every distributor does. Plus, even if they are cleaned upon being returned, they’re still going to pick up a lot of junk before they make it back to the store. They’re getting pushed around on trucks, they’re stacked on docks, they’re sitting on concrete floors in coolers. If it’s raining, they might get wheeled through mud/puddles.*
And one of the biggest culprits is milk. Milk jugs get overfilled and milk running down the outside of the jug gets onto the crate. Milk jugs break or leak while being delivered etc.
On top of all that, I think between sitting in the sun for the better part of their lives, getting kicked across the concrete, used as a step stool and otherwise being mistreated leads to them getting pretty scuffed up which allows a lot of stuff to get embedded into the plastic that’s not going to be rinsed off easily.
*I have a juice distributor that I won’t order from if it was going to be raining on the delivery date. They must be staging things outside since if it’s raining, everything that gets delivered is covered in mud. Most everything was shrink wrapped, so it didn’t really got onto the bottles, but my hands and clothes would be filthy after putting it away.
I used to make regular deliveries of flour in bags to a medium-sized bakery.
The bags were stacked on pallets and shrink-wrapped.
Before they took them into the bakery, they stripped the wrap off and, with the aid of a special machine, they inverted the whole lot don’t one of their own pallets. The wrap went in a skip and I took the used pallets back. They wouldn’t let me in through the door either.
Was it a larger bakery and/or one that has large or nationwide clients?
I’ve grown up in and around produce warehouses. Some big, some small, some filthy, some immaculate. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that part of growing and getting larger accounts is additional certifications which require more and more procedures and restrictions put into place. A very good friend of mine owns a produce distributor that provides some stuff to a large fast food franchise across the country.
I’ve known this person for my entire life. My family and his family spend a lot of time together. He’s even my sister’s godfather. But since he opened this warehouse, I’ve never been past the front office that you walk into upon entering.
I mean, I could, it’s just more work than it’s worth to put on all the gear (hair/beard net, jumpsuit, guest badge, singing in etc etc etc). It’s a lot of work, but they need to keep everything fairly well locked down to help prevent both something malicious and just to lower the chances of an accidental contamination.
Also, fun fact, usually ready-to-use (ie peeled/cleaned) vegetables that are going to factories for things like frozen dinners or pizzas, are delivered in colored bags. It’s a lot easier to notice a scrap of plastic on the line if it’s bright blue rather than clear.
Properly called a snood.
For the same reason, plasters in first aid kits anywhere food is processed are always blue. There are no blue vegetables.
nm…
JFC nevermind…
I clean milk crates in the dishwasher with the top rack removed. It does a much better job than I can alone with a hose and brush. I’m guessing a pressure washer would be useful, too.
One thing to consider is other types of storage containers. 2 gallon square buckets, which you can often get free from hardware stores, bakeries, &cet, make good tall shelves. Wooden fingerjointed, dovetailed, or splined boxes of all sorts make good short ones, and are often useful storage themselves. Ammo boxes work great, too.
I think if you use something like a cinder block, milk crate or bucket to prop up shelves, you’re sacrificing a great deal of horizontal space on the shelves for the support. It might be worth investing a bit more in a support structure that’s not as wide. For example, I saw plans for a bookcase that used black iron plumbing pipe as the supports, though that would not be cheap. Or another page used angle iron at the corners of the boards as the supports. It looked good and it seemed to minimize the amount of space used.