Poly Woven Bags - Big Things in Small Packages for 2018

If you visit our website (and you should), you can see that the major focus of our business is dedicated to bulk bags.  These heavy-duty, flexible containers are used around the globe to ship all manner of granular goods. From the organic growing medium you plant your seeds in to the exporting of your harvested crops, bulk bags are essential to a growing number of consumers all over the planet. Can you think of any other bulk container that costs pennies per kilo to move your materials? When figuring out the most efficient method of transporting your bulk goods, it’s very difficult to find anything comparable to the tried, tested, and true Royaltouchfablon bag. 

A farmer tips his hat as he carrys a PP woven bag of coffee beans

However, it should be noted that not every end user has access to the heavy equipment required to move a filled bulk bag around. If you have ever had a cubic yard of garden soil delivered to your driveway, you know that bag isn’t moving until it is almost empty! That being said, what is the solution for people who don’t have a forklift in their garden shed? What about your customers who simply don’t require a metric tonne of your product? There is an answer, and just like bulk bags, it involves the incredible strength of woven polypropylene.

A polypropylene woven bag (PPW) has the same characteristics of a bulk bag, but with less physical engineering. This is due to the fact that PPW bags are designed to be handled by people, not machinery. A typical PPW bag has a 50 lb weight capacity, is about 20” wide by 30” long. Some are larger, smaller, heavier, lighter, etc. However, they all need to be around that average size so they can be lifted by people. Think of a sand bag holding back rising flood waters, shoring up the dam one bag at a time.

Poly Woven - What's the Big Deal?

The main advantage to using PPW is the price. Since they are simply designed and require far less material than a bulk bag, the price per bag is very low. A very common and inexpensive design is the open mouth, circular woven PPW. Essentially a fabric tube is woven on a loom and cut to the specified size. Once complete, there is very little sewing involved which is one of the larger costs associated with bulk packaging. The one end is also left open for filling, so even less sewing is required per unit.

In addition to cost, the strength of a PPW bag is unmatched. Using the same techniques as their 1000 kg counterparts, tapes are extruded and woven together to create a very strong and resilient fabric. This fabric is then cut and sewn together in a fashion that creates uniform strength in all directions. Once filled and closed, a woven polypropylene becomes one solid unit that resists tearing, punctures, and the stresses of handling. Think about how many different people and machines have handled a bag of grass seed you find on the shelf. Filled, tossed on a pallet, loaded, shipped, unloaded, taken off the pallet, placed on a shelf, and finally into your hands. Is the PPW bag still in one piece? For sure! I bet you noticed the eye-catching graphics too…

Stand Out From the Crowd

Another fantastic benefit of PPW bags is the fact they can be branded just like the larger bulk bags. Using the same BOPP printing methods, you could literally have an HD picture of your face on every single bag produced. Why you would do that is beyond me, but if you know your customer base, all the power to you! This type of branding allows your business to really show off your product on a high-gloss, high-strength bag. The only limit is your imagination, and perhaps the budget.

Yet another excellent quality PPW bags provide is the ability to be spot printed as well. If you do not require a glossy, high resolution image on your bulk packaging, just remember you can have them printed with traditional methods as well. A simple “Product of ________” or “Net weight 50 lbs” costs next to nothing when adding a couple spot colours to a custom order of PPW bags. In addition to the custom orders, existing plain white PPW bags can be loaded into simple offset printing machine and labeled however you see fit. This allows people with existing PPW inventory to change the message as often as required.

Finally, there is one more thing that makes poly woven bags an excellent choice for product packaging. Automation! If you are a busy processor, you know that getting your product out the door is very important. Custom sized bags with custom openings and closure options can make all the difference in the world. Manually filling product 50 lbs at a time does not make much sense. Having equipment that can fill a couple hundred bags every minute not only makes sense, it makes you cents.