What plastic is used for wheelie bins?

Wheeled bins are made of strong polyethylene (PE), and today every bin contains a lot of recycled plastic.

They are common and familiar now, but 20 years ago wheelie bins were a new and unusual sight on roadsides across Australia.

Wheeled bins have extreme lifespans - exposed to all kinds of weather, knocked around while being emptied and parked on the side of the road. A wheeled bin, meanwhile, must safely store all household waste, from garden waste to bottles and glass.

It needs to be tough, durable and UV resistant. When the polymer is produced, the service life of the toughness is planned and tested. High resistance to impact and wear, high resistance to environmental stress cracking and long-term resistance to UV degradation are the characteristics of PE grades

This includes impact and drop tests to demonstrate the robustness and long-term performance of the MGB.

HDPE is suitable for manufacturing large durable products and is ideal for fast and efficient molding.

The astonishing history surrounding waste/wheelie bins can be discussed for days because there has forever been a necessity to hold and move unwanted items away to different places in an uncluttered and efficient approach. Fossilised fragments of wooden wheelie bins have been discovered within the volcanic ruins of Pompeii.

Although these were intended for the same purpose, “modern” plastic wheelie bins are far better and were first developed in the 1960s by Frank Rotherham Mouldings for transporting waste from one areas of his factory to another. It wasn’t until a health and safety inspector spotted the potential of these bins that they become used in other commercial environments. It would still take another twenty years before they were widely used.

During the 60s waste bins had been particularly heavy and were usually seen as round metal containers with two handles and a top. The new design invented in the 1960s was a magnificent development which could help decrease the number of back injuries suffered by waste collectors who would lift the heavy, metal, wheel-less bins. However, it wasn’t thoroughly utilised until the 1980s when automatic mechanisms on waste collection vehicles would be designed to pick-up and empty the bins effortlessly.