Cutting plastic without losing protection

The usual plan is to buy a thinner roll of the same commodity film. It works for a week. Then the loads start leaning, the operator adds two or three more revolutions so the pallet looks safe, and the weight per pallet climbs back to where it started. The reduction exists on the purchase order and nowhere on the loading bay.

The version that goes wrong more expensively is a straight material swap with nothing else changed. Substituting a material without engineering the load produces more damage and more returns than the plastic it removed. A rewrapped pallet uses its material twice. A rejected one uses it twice and pays for the journey as well.

Toreto's own wrap test of August 2026 separates them cleanly. Same pallet, same machine, the same power stretch and tension settings from start to finish, with the film cut off and weighed after every run. Solid film at 23µ, 20µ and 17µ all held the load at 9.9 kg/sq in. The three of them weighed 200 g, 174 g and 140 g. Taking a third off the thickness changed the weight and left the holding untouched.

Push the same logic further and it breaks. A 12µ nano film managed 7.6 kg/sq in — the weakest holding in the test — on 91 g. Nano needs a well-set machine and unforgiving consistency, and it fails when anything is off, so most users end up double-wrapping. Doubled, it is 182 g and roughly twice the cost per pallet: more plastic than the 17µ film, for a result the operator no longer trusts.

In the same test, Supersonic and Aerosonic at 16µ held the pallet at 10 kg/sq in on 66 g. Better holding than the 23µ solid film, on roughly a third of the material. The saving is not in the gauge. It is in the number of revolutions: the reinforcement carries the containment, so the wrapper runs about half the turns, and half the turns is half the metres.

Across normal loads the working figure is 40–50% less film at equal or better containment; on the tested pallet the gap was wider still. These are Toreto's measurements rather than estimates, and the cash figures behind them move with film price and pallet size. The weights do not.

There is a second effect worth having. At half the revolutions the same wrapper turns out roughly twice as many pallets a shift. Supersonic (solid) and Aerosonic (macroperforated, breathable) are built from the same materials and perform alike, so a line that needs airflow can move to the perforated version without changing machine settings or cost per pallet.

Plastic does not only hide in machine-wrapped operations. Andy Chinnery, Toreto's Managing Partner in the UK, ran a measured test there in August 2026 on a hard load — large gaps, very sharp corners — that had arrived machine-wrapped from a factory with several film failures. He cut the film off and weighed it, rewrapped the same pallet by hand from the Hyper Wrap System dispenser, then cut and weighed that too.

Conventional hand stretch film: 181 g, £0.60 of film, two minutes, £0.40 of labour — £1.00 to wrap the pallet. Hyper Wrap System: 151 g, £0.54 of film, one minute, £0.20 of labour — £0.74. Same operative, same rate of £0.20 a minute. That is 26% off the cost of the same pallet, in half the time.

Be precise about where the reduction is. Half as many metres went onto the load, because the film is stronger and wider; the weight falls from 181 g to 151 g. The film and its dispenser frame are sold together as one system — the frame with a full roll on it weighs about 3 kg — and the film is not sold on its own.

Some plastic does not need to be engineered down. It needs to leave. Bubble wrap, plastic void fill, plastic banding and plastic tape are protecting single cartons and part-filled boxes — they are not holding a tonne of product upright — and paper does that job. The same substitution runs further up the line: where individual packs are finished in heat-shrink polythene, the AW12 and AW24 systems wrap them cold in stretch film instead, with no tunnel to heat — less material, and about 86.7% less energy.

SwiftWrap is expanding honeycomb kraft that both cushions and immobilises what it is wrapped around, in place of bubble wrap. Swiftpack is crinkle-cut void fill from recycled kraft. Envigour is paper bubble cushioning. Swift is paper strapping that replaces plastic banding on light to medium-duty work — carton closing, bundling, light pallet stabilisation, dry storage. All of it is recyclable, kerbside-friendly and free of plastic content.

Two honest limits. Paper strapping is light to medium duty and belongs on dry storage, not on a load that needs containment force to survive a lorry — and if it is going onto an existing strapping machine, test compatibility before you commit. Paper replaces the packaging around the product; the pallet itself still has to be held.

Weigh first. Cut the film off a finished pallet, weigh it, and count the revolutions the machine actually ran. Without that number every later claim is an opinion and every reduction is invisible, including the ones that worked. Do it on three different loads, not one.

Fix the containment before you take anything away. If the load only stands up because of the last three turns, removing them will show up as damage six weeks later. A film that holds structurally lets you take the turns out without giving anything back. Then substitute — paper where the packaging is protecting a carton rather than a pallet.

Then measure the same things again: grams a pallet, revolutions, wrapping time, and damage and rewraps across a full quarter. A reduction that shows up on all four is real. One that only shows on the roll price is the one that reverses.