The Mysterious Life Of Printed Poly Bags
The incredible printed poly bags have a story worthy of a superhero. Looking on line, one finds a colorful history of accidental discovery (an unplanned encounter between a chemical compound and heat in a German laboratory), long unsuspected possibilities, and final world-wide acceptance and renown. The variety of bag uses, styles, and capabilities is rivaled only by the unlimited design choices. To understand poly bags, one must go past the engaging parade of colorful samples and the competition among suppliers to explore the technical language, the properties that make the bags so valuable, and the design features that are limited only by human imagination.
Let me first introduce polyethylene, earth’s most widely used plastic. It has the valuable attribute of being strong though thin, can be clear or colored, frosted or plain, metallic or paisley. It is a champion in the face of heat and performs almost as well in the cold. It is tough, puncture and moisture proof, and hard to tear. It can be welded, cut, molded, rolled, and filmed. 80 million metric tons annually are fed into the maw of the world’s manufacturers, and the commodity has its own platform on the world stage, the Plastics Exchange.
Back to the bags. There are more bags than one would guess without pondering every aspect of life. We are all familiar with the plastic shopping bag (lying flat with many others in a tear-off stack), the potting soil bag (stacked at the garden center), the ice bag (in the freezer outside the convenience store, sturdy and tear-proof), the stand-up bags (to stuff with marketing materials and line up on a table), and the waterproof bags (to take the goldfish home from the fair.) Think of sandwich bags and freezer bags, zip lock bags and sealing bags for food storage, bubble wrap bags for shipping, big bags for trade shows and little bags for dog poop. You might not know about the ones the police use, the ones approved by the US Post Office, the ones the medics use for specimens, or the ones boiling in the sterilizer. Use in the sterilizer,
How about a bag with a handle, ma’am? Would that be a die cut handle, or perhaps a nice bridge snap? Or a loop snap, a Euro handle, a drawstring, an over-the -shoulder strap, or a fashionable wave? Check out this cutesy T-shirt bag or this to-die-for, custom, up-scale, boutique bag. Don’t miss the green bags, green for the environment and green in fact, being made of sugarcane. (Still our favorite superhero, though, in a vegetable disguise poly.)
These heroic bags, the product of many dedicated brains (mostly German, for some reason) and not a few accidental discoveries, can be low or high density, biodegradable, or susceptible only to the dreaded Sphingomonas (a voracious bacteria). They have remarkable resistance to heat and chemicals, to moisture, and to being left outside in all weathers. They have strong bottom seals and durable side seams, can be transformed into static barriers, and can be disguised as a waffle. Clarity is one of their hard-to-imitate virtues, and they can even survive long periods in a hospital sterilizer.
Designer bags and custom ordered bags can rise to the level of art. The printing processes used for poly bags use up to eight colors, and the bags themselves can be tinted to any desired shade. Combining bright colors with custom logos or designs in any imaginable shape bag can achieve results that dazzle and impress. A plastic bag can be thick or thin, tiny or huge, soft or rigid, and plain or pretentious. They can be truly be all things to all men.
You need a decoder to really understand this netherworld. Terms like resin, monomers, ethylene crackers, impact strength, haze, gloss, low slip, low creep, and – my favorite – slick – are all part of the secret language.
Poly bags are found pretty much anywhere, and there are over 170,000 sites on the Internet offering to sell the most decorative or the most useful bag at the best price. The choice is mind boggling and stirs the urge to create fantastic printed poly bags of your very own.
Arthur Paulson is an authority in the field of printed poly. Check out his website to know more about printed poly bags.
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