Bin liners & refuse sacks

Four numbers decide whether a sack works

The volume of the bin, the useful width and length of the sack, the gauge, and the material. Get any of them wrong and the sack either splits or costs 30% more than it needed to.

Size: read it as width and length, not as litres

EN 13592 designates a sack by two figures — useful width P and useful length L in millimetres, written 500/700. Litre ratings printed on retail packaging are marketing figures and are not comparable between manufacturers.

A 240 litre wheelie bin needs a sack of roughly 750/300 × 1150 mm; a 1100 litre container needs 1200/700 × 1400 mm. Our bin liner size finder converts a bin volume into the sack dimensions in one step.

Gauge: micron, not gauge, and not both

Continental Europe specifies in microns; parts of the UK trade still quote gauge. For sacks the conversion is 1 micron to 4 gauge, so a 200 gauge sack is 50 micron.

It is the same scale stretch film uses — one gauge is strictly 0.254 micron, and the four-to-one rule is that figure rounded, which runs 1.6% light. What differs between the two products is not the scale but what a number means on it: 23 µm is an ordinary machine film and a very light refuse sack. The micron and gauge converter shows both readings of the same figure.

Duty	Gauge	Typical waste	Load
Light	12–20 µm	Office paper, hand towels	to 5 kg
Medium	25–40 µm	Mixed kitchen and food waste	to 10 kg
Heavy	40–70 µm	Commercial and HoReCa waste	to 15 kg
Extra heavy	70–125 µm	Sharp, wet or construction waste	to 25 kg

Material: LDPE or HDPE

LDPE stretches and resists puncture, which is what you want for anything with corners in it. HDPE is stiffer and tears more easily but delivers the same burst strength at roughly half the gauge, so it is cheaper per sack and lighter for EPR reporting.

As a rule: LDPE for general commercial waste and anything carried any distance, HDPE for clean, light, high-volume streams lifted straight out of the bin.

Recycled content under PPWR

We supply LDPE sacks at 30%, 50% and 80% post-consumer content with a material composition statement in the Declaration of Conformity pack, so the figure you report to your EPR scheme is documented rather than estimated.