Shrink plastic full#

The packaged poultry was frozen and then put through a number of heat and cooling cycles, which caused the wrapping to firm up around the packaging, making it possible for the birds to be preserved for longer periods, while keeping the flavoring strong.

The approach worked like this: A plastic film was wrapped around a whole bird, and then vacuum sealed. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a technique called cry-o-vac emerged as a way to vacuum seal turkeys and chickens inside of bags. So to start with, letвЂ™s talk about the birds wrapped in bags. ( pinkmoose/Flickr) Birds wrapped in bags: How frozen turkeys helped get us shrink-wrap The Butterball turkey, and others like it, was an important test case for shrink-wrap. It starts with birds wrapped in bags, and it has more in common with the Large Hadron Collider than you might think. Of course, shrink-wrap, no matter your views on plastic, is a fascinating concept, an example of innovations in the fields of chemistry, manufacturing, engineering, and physics coming together to help solve one of packagingвЂ™s great challenges-how can packages be properly and securely sealed before reaching consumers? The story is more complicated and interesting than it sounds.

Shrink plastic full#

And shrink-wrap is a great example of how plastic can reach its full potential when heated. Plastic wouldnвЂ™t look like it does today without a little heat to help mold it and a little chill to harden it. Plastic and heat have something of a close relationship. So it makes sense that the material created a similar effect with plastic baggies. Ziploc bags and their generic counterparts tend to be made up of a variant of plastic thatвЂ™s also used in many forms of shrink-wrap, polyethylene-and heat (ofter in the form of a heat sealer) is often a key tool used in the creation of those products. It will reshape itself around the material, creating a tight fit around what might have previously been a loose one. At high temperatures, plastic tends to firm up and tighten up thanks to the heat, rejiggering the molecules into a new shape. In many ways, shrink-wrap borrows from a similar, if not the same, concept.