Why barrier films?
Vast amounts of freshly produced and delivered products have to be kept fresh on supermarket and shop shelves. This is required not only for the products to look appealing and to be safe to the consumer but also to be kept saleable within the restrictions of the 'sell by' concept, thus reducing supermarket scrap rates. To select the right film configuration requires experience and a good understanding of the specific application. barrierfilms.eu can help with film selection once all packaging requirements are established.
Plastic film packaging for protection purposes plays a significant role in the food industry and other industries and is likely to continue to do so for a long time.
Standard plastic films used for packaging, like PE, PET or PP, although having many desirable properties, do often have insufficient protective barrier performance to completely fulfil all the strict requirements for food shelf life protection and other protective purposes.
The barrier demands are to protect against gases or odours and water vapour entering into the pack or being released from it.
Film properties in this context are mostly specified as WVTR (water vapour transmission rate) or OTR (oxygen transmission rate). Barriers for other media may also be required but are not normally available as a standard; but they can be researched or developed at a cost against known criteria.
Both of these parameters can be influenced considerably by modifying plastic film properties either by adding special ingredients into single layer film, co-extrusion of multi-layer films or by coating after extrusion. High barrier properties are often desirable and achievable but higher barrier performance invariably results in higher cost. For that reason a number of films with different degrees of barrier properties are normally offered depending on the barrier needs and cost limits of specific applications.
Typically there are three types of barrier film in the market today:
All three have their relative merits and either can sometimes be used in an application and the selection regarding which one to choose, apart from or in addition to a set of clear data, often depends on the packaging designer's intuitive final choice or personal preference based on particular experience.
This is why barrierfilms.eu offers all three types. Some of these are stocked, i.e. 'made to stock' items arising from regular customer demand; others are 'made to order' items with reasonable lead times. Depending on the stock situation, sample reels for production and properties testing can often be supplied at short notice.
Like in many other products, also here, in addition to the designer's experience, criteria and opinions change with fashion and new ideas come up from time to time. At barrierfilms.eu we offer to contribute our experience to the development of your packaging for the food and other industries.
Send us the details of your packaging requirements to sales@barrierfilms.eu and we will gladly propose a barrierfilm solution.
