5 min read
A 240 litre wheeled bin takes a 1000 × 1200 mm liner — usable width 1000, usable length 1200, which EN 13592 writes as 1000/1200. For general commercial waste that is 30 µm LDPE, medium duty, or 120 gauge if your supplier still quotes in gauge.
For any other bin, and for waste that is heavier, wetter or sharper than general, the calculator works it out.
EN 13592 designates a sack by two numbers — usable width P and usable length L in millimetres, so 700/1100 is 700 wide and 1100 long, laid flat. Sizes are rounded up to the nearest 50 mm because that is how the trade buys them. Thickness is a starting point: the same bin in a hospital and in an office needs two different sacks.
Want this as a PDF? The answer above is yours either way. The PDF is the working written out — the figures you entered, the result, and the assumptions behind it — for a colleague or a purchase requisition.
How EN 13592 writes a size
Two numbers, both in millimetres, both measured on the sack laid flat:
- P — usable width. Half the circumference of the tube. A sack marked 1000 opens into a tube 2000 mm around.
- L — usable length. Rim to base, before it is gathered and tied.
So 500/700 is a sack 500 mm wide and 700 mm long laid flat. The order never changes, and neither number includes the seam or the fold at the top. If a quotation gives you three numbers, the middle one is a gusset and the sack is not a plain tube.
Sizes for standard bins
General commercial waste, bin tipped or lifted mechanically:
| Bin | Sack, EN 13592 | Thickness | Sack holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 l pedal bin | 500/650 | 30 µm | about 30 l |
| 50 l swing bin | 600/800 | 30 µm | about 55 l |
| 80 l wheeled bin | 750/1000 | 30 µm | about 110 l |
| 120 l wheeled bin | 800/1050 | 30 µm | about 130 l |
| 140 l wheeled bin | 800/1150 | 30 µm | about 150 l |
| 240 l wheeled bin | 1000/1200 | 30 µm | about 220 l |
| 360 l wheeled bin | 1150/1250 | 30 µm | about 280 l |
Above 360 litres the liner is made gusseted rather than as a plain tube, and the length is specified against the container. The width still follows the same rule — half the perimeter — but send us the container and we will specify the rest.
Why the sack is narrower than the bin
A 240 litre bin has an opening of roughly 560 × 700 mm. Its perimeter is 2,520 mm, so a naive calculation asks for a sack 1,260 mm wide. The liners actually sold are around 950 to 1,000.
The difference is that a sack does not sit into the corners. It rounds them. Treating the opening as an ellipse rather than a rectangle gives
P = π (W + D) / 4
which for that bin is 990 mm — and it holds across the range, giving 750 for an 80 litre bin, 800 for a 120 and 1,900 for a 1,100 litre container. For a round bin, where the width and the depth are both the diameter, the same formula reduces to half the circumference.
Order to the naive figure and you buy 25% more polyethylene than the job needs, on every sack, forever.
Thickness: what the waste decides
| What goes in | Material | Thickness | Gauge | Duty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Office and dry light waste | HDPE | 12 µm | — | Light |
| General commercial waste | LDPE | 30 µm | 120 | Medium |
| Food and wet waste | LDPE | 40 µm | 160 | Medium |
| Garden and green waste | LDPE | 50 µm | 200 | Heavy |
| Construction waste | LDPE | 75 µm | 300 | Extra heavy |
| Rubble, aggregate, plaster | LDPE | 125 µm | 500 | Rubble grade |
Move up one row if the sack is lifted out by hand, carried downstairs or dropped down a chute. A tipped bin carries its own load; a sack that is lifted carries the load on its own seams, and that is where the failures happen.
HDPE or LDPE
This is not a price question, though it gets treated as one.
HDPE is much stronger in tension per micron and much weaker against puncture. It rustles, it is thin, and for paper and dry packaging it is genuinely the right material — a 12 µm HDPE sack does the work of a 25 µm LDPE one using half the polyethylene.
LDPE stretches before it tears and resists puncture. Anything with a corner, a bone, a broken bottle or a wet load in it needs LDPE, and putting HDPE there to save money produces a bin area that has to be cleaned twice a week.
Gauge and microns
Gauge is one hundredth of a thousandth of an inch, so one gauge is 0.254 microns — 120 gauge is 30 µm, 200 gauge is 50 µm, 500 gauge is 125 µm.
The sack trade rounds that to four gauge to one micron, which is where those tidy numbers come from. It runs 1.6% light: 200 gauge is strictly 50.8 µm, not
- Nobody argues about 1.6% on a sack, so the rounded rule is fine — but it is
a rounding of one scale, not a second scale, and the same conversion applies to stretch film.
The trap is not the arithmetic. It is that 50 µm means completely different things in different materials: 50 µm of LDPE is a heavy duty sack, 50 µm of HDPE is far stronger in tension and far weaker against a corner, and 50 µm of stretch film is an unusually thick film for a very difficult load. See the micron and gauge converter, which does the conversion once and then tells you what the number means for each.
Two things the calculator will tell you
Clinical and offensive waste is a colour problem before it is a sack problem. Orange, yellow, yellow-and-black, tiger stripe — the colour is set by the waste stream and by whoever collects it, not by us. A correctly made sack in the wrong colour is a rejected collection.
Rubble sacks fail because they are filled, not because they are thin. A 125 µm sack will hold 25 kg all day and split at the seam at 40. The working rule is to fill to about a third of the volume, and no specification change fixes a sack that is being filled to the top.
What we quote
Our bin liner quotations state the EN 13592 size, the thickness in microns, the material and the polymer grade, the number per roll or per case, and the cases per pallet. Sacks are made to a size, not to a nominal litre rating, and a “240 litre sack” from two suppliers can differ by 100 mm in either direction.
Send us the sack you buy today — a photograph of the case label is enough — and we will quote against it line for line. If your current specification is heavier than the job needs, we will say so; a thinner sack that works is a better order than a thicker one that gets returned.
The products this calculator is about
The sizes this page returns map onto bin liners and refuse sacks — most often medium duty for office and general waste, heavy duty where the load is sharp or wet, and wheelie bin liners for 240 and 1100 litre containers.