When business owner Denise Richardson took her company to a new site in a Pembroke industrial park, she settled on an innovative way of brightening her concrete surroundings.

“I decided to think outside the box,” the head of Sprint International Express explained of her businesses’ wooden floors.

Her use of discarded shipping pallets to furnish the company headquarters on Addendum Lane South was commended by the environmental group Greenrock

“It’s great to see people coming up with their own ways to use something that would otherwise end up being thrown away,” Greenrock director Gordon Johnson said.

“Pallets that get brought to the Island would otherwise end up being burned or otherwise disposed of.”

Pallets are the wooden slabs upon which goods are shipped and transported by fork lift.

There is no shortage of them around Ms Richardson’s business: the Burrows Lightbourn warehouse just up the road has stacks of them to spare — as do supermarkets and virtually any other company that imports stock.

“I wanted to give the office a warm, rustic look — to make it into a more inviting space,” Ms Richardson said. “It was a lot of work, but I like being handy and creative.”

After moving into the new location in September, she started gathering the more sturdy model of pallets and breaking them down.

Ms Richardson said she’d never handled an electric saw or laid a floor before, but she set to work anyway — pulling staples and nails from the planks and then sealing them and turning them into a floor.

For shelving, she sawed pallets in half and erected them on a pine frame. Shelving and wainscoting came from scrap wood that she salvaged from other businesses or the dump.

“You’d be amazed at what people throw away — tables and stools,” she said. “Other peoples’ trash is my treasure.”