Plastic shopping bags are commonly used by the consumers in daily life, which can facilitate the consumers with convenience and on the other hand, also cause serious environmental pollution and waste of energy and resources as a result of excessive use and improper recycling.

Especially those ultrathin shopping bags, which are liable to be broken, are usually discarded at random by the people and thus become the major source of “white pollution”. Today more and more countries and areas have restricted the production, sales and use of plastic shopping bags. The public also become aware of the significance of environmental protection.

In order to solve the environmental problem caused by discarded plastic shopping bags, there are two major solutions. On one hand, the public should reduce the use of plastic shopping bags. On the other hand, the manufacturer should improve the quality of plastic shopping bags so that they can be reused for several times, which also help reduce the use of plastic shopping bags.

The service life of plastic shopping bag can be extended by improving its tensile strength. This article provides a simplified tensile strength test method of plastic shopping bags for your reference.

Figure 1. Plastic Shopping Bag

The test specimens are plastic shopping bags provided by one supermarket and the testing instrument is Labthink’s XLW(PC) Auto Tensile Tester. The tests can be performed according to the following procedures.

(1)   Cut 5 pieces of specimens along the machine direction and transverse direction of the plastic shopping bag samples respectively. The dimension of the specimen should be 15mm by 200mm.

(2)   Clamp the two ends of the specimen in the upper and lower sample grips. The longitudinal axis of the specimen should exactly coincide with the line of centers of the upper and lower sample grips.

(3)   Set test speed and specimen width and other necessary test parameters.

(4)   Click Test button to start test. The system will calculate and display the test results automatically.

Various test results including tensile force at break and tensile strength are provided for reference. According to those test results, the manufacturers of plastic shopping bags can determine whether their products can meet requirements for repeated use and may improve the manufacturing craft if the test results are unsatisfactory.

For more details about XLW(PC) Auto Tensile Tester, please visit www.labthink.com

About Labthink Instruments Co., Ltd:

Labthink Instruments Co., Ltd is one leading supplier of packaging testing instruments, which is headquartered in Jinan, China and operated in Boston, U.S.A.