Truckers, like everybody else that has to fill the gas tank, have been poleaxed by high oil and gas prices. One company thinks they could take a cue from backpackers facing uphill slogs: lighten your load.

That's the pitch from iGPS, an Orlando, Fla.-based company that says plastic shipping pallets could do for the trucking industry what Congress so far hasn't: provide relief from high gas prices. It's the latest sign that high gas prices have even plastics companies jumping on the green bandwagon.

The logic is straightforward. Most tractor trailers carry lots of heavy, wooden pallets, whether fully-loaded or not. That adds weight to every trip, lowers fuel economy, and means extra emissions of greenhouse gases. Replacing the wooden pallets with longer-lasting plastic shipping pallets could bring savings across the board, iGPS says.

High prices for gasoline have paled beside even higher prices for diesel, which truckers use. That has sparked a revival of the "hot fuel" movement—consumer revolts against super-heated fuel at gas stations that shortchanges customers, especially high-volume truckers. More broadly, high fuel prices have disrupted global trade, throwing a wrench in the wheels of globalization.

Now, the battlefield is heading inside the semis. Plastic pallets have several advantages over their wooden cousins, according to an independent study carried out by Environmental Resource Management. They last longer, they weigh less, and they don't need paint or chemical treatments. Since a plastic pallet can easily handle 100 trips—versus two trips for a single-use wooden pallet—the difference in greenhouse-gas emissions is stark: 45,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide for the plastic pallets, compared with 300,000 kilograms for the wooden pallets. The iGPS website has a calculator which lets shipping companies tally how much fuel they'd save by switching from wood to plastic.

Most importantly, says iGPS, you don't have to chop down trees to get plastic pallets: A Virginia Tech study found that 40% of the U.S. hardwood harvest goes to wooden pallet production.

But plastic pallets are a petrochemical creation—all plastic. The top-of-the-line pallets use virgin plastic, which isn't the most environmentally-friendly. The bulk of the emissions from the plastic pallets comes during production, rather than daily use. To get around that, pallet makers have launched a couple of greener blends, from 15% recycled to 100% recycled plastic.

Everybody from T. Boone Pickens to Al Gore is pitching ambitious plans to change America's energy mix. Maybe the lowest-hanging fruit, even if it's plastic, can be the juiciest