pallets in Australia. The Australian government formed the Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool (CHEP) to exploit these assets, and it was CHEP that introduced the Australian standard pallet. The government sold the assets of CHEP in the 1950s, mostly to port authorities, but the trading name of CHEP was taken by Brambles Limited and is now the largest pallet rental business in the world. During the 1970s, Australia converted to the metric system. Australia pushed ahead with metrication quickly, and did this with less fuss and opposition than occurred in other countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. In order to proceed rapidly, a quick decision was needed on pallet sizes before decisions on metrication of packaging could be made. Because of this, it was decided to retain the Australian standard pallet, despite it being peculiar to Australia. International standardisation Not using an international standard pallet can increase transport costs of international trade. Export goods may have to be repalletized to suit the requirements of the destination country. In some cases they must be repalletized twice in the distribution chain, once on to a pallet suitable for international containers and again at the destination country if they are also not using a standard pallet. Likewise, import goods will not arrive on an Australian standard pallet and need repalletizing for RACE containers. The intrinsic advantage of palletized transport is that it minimises manual handling operations. These repalletizations detract from that advantage. A 2002 report commissioned by the Australian Department of Transport and Regional Services examined the possibility of replacing the Australian standard pallet with the ISO standard size of 1200×1000 mm. Two-thirds of Australia's trade is with countries that use either this size, or the near equivalent US standard size of 48×40 inches so changing to this standard would be less costly than to other standard pallet sizes. The report concluded that making this change would be worth a net present value of $2.5 billion at a discount rate of 30%, or $5.1 billion at discount rate of 20%. Despite the analysis in the report, Australia continues to use the Australian standard pallet. The cost of making the change is estimated at $600 million over ten years, which includes not only the change to the pallets themselves, but also to storage racking and other equipment. Operating costs are estimated to increase by $100 million over the same ten years: