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Product Benefits
Description
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Packaging Tape
What's The Right Packaging Tape For Me?
Packaging tape is an industrial-grade tape intended to close and seal a box for shipment. Sounds pretty simple right? Well, once you think of how many different sizes, weights and shapes of boxes there are out there, you quickly realize that packaging tape has to perform for an extremely wide variety of applications.
Adhesive Types
Solvent? Hot Melt? Acrylic?
First we need to take a look at the adhesive, because, after all, tape is pretty useless without the sticky stuff. And, it’s all about matching the right adhesive to the right box and under the right conditions.
- Natural Rubber or Solvent – a strong, aggressive adhesive used for problematic boxes with high recycled content (corrugated dust) and polythene products, irregular surfaces in normal or cold temperatures. Best all round performance.
- Hot Melt – For high volume use sealing boxes with low recycled content around room temperature. Not so good for sealing polythene products. Great for automatic case sealing machines.
- Acrylic – A popular and economical, water based adhesive, great for sealing boxes and polythene wrapping in normal temperature conditions. Great value all round performance.
As you can see, each type of adhesive suits a particular need – whether it be cold temperatures or problematic corrugated. Natural Rubber or solvent adhesive is the most reliable due to its ability to adhere to almost anything even in dusty, very cold or very hot working conditions. Whilst it is slightly more expensive, it is easy to use, you may not need to use as much and you can have peace of mind that it will stick permanently every time. Hot melt is a good adhesive and has a high initial tack so great for use on a machine. One challenge with this product is it doesn’t perform as well when sticking to polythene products, cartons with high recycled content or in dusty conditions. Acrylic adhesive is an excellent economical option but our acrylic tapes have a successful formulation and work very well on most substrates and in ost conditions. The adhesive is also water based so it has the least impact on the environment . If you use large quantities of packaging tape you may well want to consider this option.
Thick Or Thin
Avoid Tape Splitting Or Tearing
Now that we’ve covered adhesive, an equally important factor is the film thickness. Tape thickness is usually measured in microns. There are sometime two measurements of thickness – one is the film thickness and the other is film and adhesive thickness combined. The adhesive thickness will give you an idea, based on the quality and tack of the adhesive, of how much adhesion force the tape will exert on the box. The film thickness will give you an idea on the break / shear strength of the tape (in other words, how much weight the tape can hold). More commonly, the packaging tape thickness is a reference to the film only thickness, so you may wish to inquire further to find out the adhesive thickness.
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