The difference between cling film and stretch film
Cling film and stretch film are both packaging materials, but their application areas are similar. Their main differences between cling film and stretch film in terms of application, material, thickness, transparency and stretch ratio, as follows:
1. Application of Cling film and stretch film
Cling film is mainly used in daily life, such as microwave food heating, refrigerator food preservation, fresh and cooked food packaging, etc. It is suitable for family life, supermarkets, hotels and restaurants, and industrial production of food packaging.
Stretch film is often used for packaging and transportation logistics, such as wrapping packaging of large pallets, containers, boxes, etc., and is also used for short-distance transportation and sales packaging, such as food and beverage packaging, steel, profile wrapping packaging, etc.
2. Material of Cling film and stretch film:
Cling film is usually made of polyethylene (PE), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC).
Stretch film is mainly made of polyethylene (PE). Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was also used in the early days, but due to environmental protection and cost issues, it was gradually replaced by PE stretch film.
3. Thickness and transparency:
The thickness of cling film is usually between 10-20 microns, with good transparency, which is convenient for checking the freshness of food.
The thickness of the stretch film is generally between 10-100 microns, which is relatively thick and has low transparency. Some even appear foggy white.
4. Stretch ratio: The cling film is sticky to the items, while the stretch film has a larger stretch ratio, which can reach 300%-400%, and is self-adhesive, which is related to the amount of polyisobutylene used in its material.
The second type is polyvinyl chloride, which can also be used for food packaging; the third type is polyvinylidene chloride, which is mainly used for packaging of cooked food. Since the plasticizers used in PVC cling films have carcinogenic effects, and the production cost of PVDC is too high, most domestic cling films tend to use PE as raw materials.
Stretch film, also known as stretch film and heat shrink film, is the first in China to produce PVC stretch film with PVC as base material, DOA as plasticizer and self-adhesive effect.
Due to environmental protection issues, high cost (relative to PE's high proportion, less unit packaging area), poor stretchability, etc., it was gradually eliminated when the domestic production of PE stretch film was started from 1994 to 1995.
The PE stretch film first used EVA as the self-adhesive material, but its cost was high and it had a taste. Later, PIB and VLDPE were used as self-adhesive materials. The base material is now mainly LLDPE, including C4, C6, C8 and metallocene PE (MPE).
