The Differences between Stretch and Shrink Wrap

There are a lot of people out there who should know better, but either don’t know, or have only a hazy appreciation of the differences between stretch and shrink wrap. Yes, both are synthetic plastics derived from petrochemicals. Both are durable materials with monumentally slow decomposition rates, and both will soften and/or melt when exposed to temperatures of around 210 degrees F. Nevertheless, the means by which stretch wrap and shrink wrap are produced, as well as their practical industry applications, are completely different. 

Blown Hand Stretch Film

Stretch wrap is made from low-density polyethylene (“polyethylene” coming from the Greek root-words “poly,” meaning “many”; and “ethyl,” meaning “purer air”), a common variety of plastic that gets its famous elasticity from the chemical synthesis of ethylene with alpha-olefins. Once these two different types of molecules are blended together through copolymerization, they are either left to cool in the open air, or are passed over with cooling rollers. The end result is a plastic with a surface that can be stretched up to 500% of its original area before breakage. The fact that stretch wrap is both pliable and sturdy make it the perfect plastic wrap for industrial palletizing. Large, bulky shipments are much less likely to spill when covered in stretch wrap.

LTG ShrinkFilm

Unlike stretch wrap, shrink wrap is a polymer plastic intended for packaging individual items and products. A randomly arranged set of plastic molecules gets heated with either a heat gun or a heat tunnel, causing the molecules to expand into a neater, more uniform arrangement. Once this new arrangement of plastics cools off, the wrap then “shrinks” back down to its original, rough dimensions. The plastic can be shrunk to fit around a packaged item very tightly (as in a CD case), though it can also be shrunk to fit more loosely around a particular item if a certain amount of flexible capacity is required. A new automobile would be an example of a larger item where shrink wrap gets applied more loosely, allowing for easier shipping and handling.

At Stamar, we specialize in both types of plastics. We carry many different varieties of stretch film: blown machine stretch film (stretch film that’s been naturally air-cooled), cast machine stretch film (stretch film that’s been machine-cooled), and our patented Goodwrapper ®stretch film, which allows for reduced friction on the hands when being wrapped or unwrapped. As far as shrink films, we offer LTG shrink film (ideal for individual food packaging), polyolefin shrink film (good for containing industrial equipment), and PVC shrink film, which is designed to shrink faster around its product when time is of the essence.

And that’s a wrap on plastic for now. Either way, we’ve got you covered.

Avoiding Falls in The Workplace

In 2009, 605 workers lost their lives and another 212,760 were seriously injured by falls while on the job. Falls are a persistent hazard found in all occupational settings, they can occur in acts as simple as walking or climbing a ladder. And yet, studies have shown that 99% of these tragedies could have been prevented with better safety procedures, including the use of supplies that help eliminate slips and falls.

A safe workplace benefits everyone from the worker to the employer. A small investment in simple but vital safety products can save billions.  Workers’ compensation and medical costs associated with occupational fall incidents have been estimated at approximately $70 billion annually in the United Sates.  More importantly, these safety precautions will spare workers and their families the unnecessary suffering of preventable injury and death.

Building cleaning and maintenance is one of the industries with the highest counts of injuries resulting from falls. Circumstances associated with falls in the workplace frequently involve slippery, cluttered, or unstable walking/working surfaces.

Stamar provides janitorial supplies that can prevent the circumstances that cause these falls to happen.  Our fast-acting, anti-caking Ice Melter is particularly useful in these icy winter months to reduce slippery weather-related hazards on walkways and parking lots.  We also offer Oil Dry, a quick and easy means to absorb oil and other liquids to prevent slips.  Our Wet Floor Signs, will alert people of potential slippery areas and our high-quality cleaning tools such as mops, bucket/wringers and sweeping compounds assure quick and thorough clean-up so that you can be confident that your building is a safe place for everyone.

Another Thing We Packaged at Stamar

It wasn’t a hard decision to make. When a member of our team at Stamar, Zach Biel, proposed that we package something beyond corrugated materials for a single day; that in fact we go ahead and initiate a non-profit blood-drive; the answer throughout our company was a resounding yes.

Zach reached out to Janet Maher at the nearby HeartlandBlood Center to help orchestrate our company’s blood drive. Furthermore, we formed an official blood donators’ committee comprised of one member from each of our respective departments. It was each committee member’s stated responsibility to help enlist as many members of his particular department as was feasible. 

The response from departmental employees was immediate, and for a company of our size, disproportionately generous. Fifteen Stamar team-members volunteered to donate one unit of their blood apiece (although three volunteers were eventually turned down on account of various medical conditions). Still, that gave us a full twelve units of blood. Since a single unit can provide enough blood to save up to three lives in any given emergency, we’d accumulated enough offerings to save up to 36 lives. Our partners at Heartland Blood Center could not have been more pleased. The actual collection day occurred this January 13^th. Heartland Blood Center’s mobile coaches drove out to Stamar to collect our blood, the collection process taking the majority of the afternoon.

In a company that emphasizes “the personal touch” in its relationships with its business customers, there could hardly be a better way of driving home that ethos than by giving blood to save lives. 36 individuals may very well have Stamar to thank for saving their lives at some point down the road. We’re even considering making our partnership with Heartland Blood Centers into an annual (possibly even biannual) event. Here’s looking forward to great, safe, and prosperous 2012 for everyone we do business with, as well as for our community at large.

The Light Is Always Green at Stamar Packaging

As part of our effort at constant self-evaluation and improvement, Stamar Packaging is forever adopting new practices and procedures that will enable us to improve the quality of our products, services, and facility capabilities. We are also deeply committed to improving the relationship between industry and the natural environment, especially in a business such as ours – packaging – that stands at the crossroads of so much concerning the future sustainability of the planet. 

To that effect, we’ve put our money where our mouth is. Recently, we contracted a green lighting company to install new, energy-efficient “green electricity” for our distribution centers in Addison, IL, Memphis, TN, and Nashville, TN. The company is refurbishing Stamar’s old, traditional lighting with innovative, energy-saving solutions. We’ve cast away and recycled 244 metal halide fixtures in our warehouse, replacing them with 218 4 lamp T5 480V fixtures with daylight/occ sensors. In our fulfillment department, we’ve removed the 18 metal halide fixtures, refurbishing them with mere 4 lamp T5 480V fixtures with daylight/occ sensors. These sensors can measure the amount of natural light coming inside our factory, adjusting themselves automatically to the light as it comes in.

The fact is, lighting can actually damage the environment. How so? It causes air pollution, since the electricity in your facility is connected directly via the power-grid to a power plant, which most commonly burns coal, oil, or gas. As result, pollutants such as carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury get released into the atmosphere, contributing to environmental problems such as global warming, acid rain, and smog.

We’re a company that believes more in solutions than in problems. Not only does this wiser energy policy save us money in the long-term, cutting our estimated maintenance costs down a full $219,571 in the next five years, but it allows us to practice the message we advocate: that in order for American industry to flourish in the 21^st century, there must be less energy consumption while maintaining the same quality standards of production.

A New Standard for Long-Distance Freight Packaging

You’ve probably seen it once or twice in your driving lives, watched – half in humor, half in horror—as oranges or tomatoes trickled, one by one, off the back of the produce truck and splattered along the highway just a few meters ahead of your speeding car. Besides being an annoyance and even a hazard to your interstate driving, it’s also one of the more common ways worldwide that produce gets lost on its way to market: faulty packaging that breaks in transit.

To solve this problem, the Fiber Box Association (FBA), the American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA) as well as nationwide box manufacturers, growers, freight companies, produce distribution centers, retailers, and various government agencies, have all teamed up and arrived at a new solution. They’ve come up with a higher standard model for packaging fruits and veggies for long-distance transport: the Corrugated Common Footprint container.

The Corrugated Common Footprint container is a new and light-weight corrugated box that employs interlocking tabs and receptacles to provide better stability and lower shipping costs (always a good thing) for produce. The box’s inner air cushioning also makes it a lot harder for produce to bruise on its way to market. Not only that, but its standard-issue design and consistency make it simple for different box manufacturers, growers, and shippers to collaborate on wildly different varieties of cargo. With the new Corrugated Common Footprint container, it’s all of one piece and one box.

Who knew there were still ways to revolutionize boxes?

A Full-On Look into Our Fulfillment Capabilities

There are people out there that sometimes give us puzzled looks and furrow their brows when we tell them we’ve got “fulfillment capabilities” here at Stamar. What does that mean exactly? Are we somehow in the business of “wish fulfillment?”

Well, I guess we’d like to think so. But more to the point, “fulfillment capabilities” are the odds and ends services we’re able to perform on behalf of an individual or another company in order to make their business easier, more streamlined, and more productive. It’s a way of selling our raw labor-power at Stamar in order to add value to your own line of products. Fulfillment capabilities can be really small jobs, like labeling, or arranging for UPS/3rd party shipping; or they can be sizably ambitious tasks, like reworking whole product lines that haven’t met all their required certifications yet. We also can perform labor-intensive grunt-work, such as sorting defective parts from functional ones; the sheep from the goats.

We didn’t always offer this service. Ken Taylor, our chief of fulfillment capabilities, used to run his own company in the area and was our go-to guy as far as fulfillment services. When the economy got hit hard a few years back, we decided we’d all do better to combine forces with Ken and provide our services under one roof.

We’re more than glad we’ve put Ken on our roster. Add to that the 30 sales-reps who’ve been combing (mostly) the greater Chicago area, and we’ve been building ourselves quite an impressive spread of fulfillment clients since first we got going in early July. As the manufacturing sector continues to regain traction from its early losses in the Great Recession, we’re looking at 2012 as a big year for our fulfillment capabilities to grow lots of opportunities for ourselves, and for our customers.

An Interview with Stamar’s Own Bill Daniels – Part II

The following is a continuation of an interview with Stamar’s go-to sales rep down in Memphis, TN, Bill Daniels. This week Bill answers questions about where he sees our company’s place in its industry, what some of our best-selling products are, and about why he sees Memphis (and the Southern state market in general) being such a crucial link in Stamar’s future.

Q: What do you think makes Stamar stand out from its competition? What’s the “Stamar difference?”
Bill: Well, a few things come immediately to mind. We’re actually going to offer you services that meet your needs. Not just what we think you need, but what you actually do need. And we have trained technicians that will actually come in and help maintain packaging equipment they sell. A lot of other folks don’t have that.

What’s more is we’re flexible around here. We’re willing to negotiate terms that are satisfactory to everyone at the table. We’re willing to build customized items for the specific needs of a specific manufacturer; there’s nothing “one-size-fits-all” about us. And we’ll stock inventory for the same day or next day delivery, because we’ve got all the necessary transportation ability to get our product quickly over to you.

Q: What are some of the most interesting products you sell?
Bill: Corrugated boxes are our number one product at Stamar. They’re stronger and more stackable than other boxes. And very easy to protectively coat.

Q: Who are some of the biggest companies/industries you sell to? Who are your typical clients?
Bill: Let’s see. I’d say our biggest are internationally-recognized lighting fixture companies and paper mills.

Q: So how many Stamar sales reps are located in the Memphis area?
Bill: We’ve got around five or six.

Q: Why did Stamar decide to merge with Package Supply & Design LLC of Memphis, TN and why was it important to reach this area specifically?
Bill: Wurzburg really was considered the number one packaging company in the Mid-South; they covered about 12 states. Those were some big shoes that needed to be filled by somebody. Memphis is one of the biggest distribution hubs in the country…Nike, Richards, you name it. A number of Fortune 500 companies. Lots of new companies are moving to Memphis because of tax breaks and whatnot. It’s really a pretty big opportunity for folks like Stamar.