You may have seen on some of our social media posts that our foam comes in all shapes and sizes, but did you know we have multiple different colors and textures, too? Foam can be molded, dyed, and repurposed to fit all sorts of different purposes, and we’re more than happy to make your foam dreams come true… within some reasonable boundaries, of course. Today, we’re telling you what all the different colors of foam actually mean for your packing solutions, as well as the different textures and purposes of each one.
Starting off basic, we have white foam, the tried and true of all foam colors. White foam holds up best in the sun; black can melt if you’re using foam for outside purposes. Quite often, we get burm orders for oil fields that are exclusively in white foam, so it can sit outside in the sun without damaging anything with melted, sticky foam. However, did you know that green foam works just as well in this situation? They’re often used for the same purposes, whether that be burms or packaging solutions, so perhaps add a splash of color to your next foam order and customize it for your brand.
Blue foam is used for medical-grade equipment and wound dressing. While there’s multiple reasons to use blue foam for these sorts of jobs, we also think it’s to do with the color itself; blue is a relaxing, vibrant color that doesn’t spark danger in a person upon seeing it. Bandaging a wound with bright pink foam dressings would be more anxiety-inducing than blue, right? There are some specialized medical-grade foams that also fight bacterial infections in wound dressings. The more you know!
Our pink foam is a lovely bubblegum color, but we don’t use it to protect our bubbles from popping. Rather, pink foam is used for technology transport and storage, like the foam that protects the corners of your TV when it’s still in the box. We use pink foam here not because we think the color is cute– pink foam is actually anti-static, providing a base, non-shockable protection for your tech while it’s on the road. Pink polyethylene foam is chemically created to decrease electro-static charges given off by whatever it’s protecting, or even the people packing it into a box. Why pink? It’s dyed pink for easy visual identification, so everyone knows that pink foam is anti-static, just like we know the sky is blue.
Black foam is fairly multi-purpose, but it’s our pride and joy at Sterling– because it’s made of entirely recycled materials. We take scraps from other foam projects, no matter the color, and create our black foam from leftover by-product or unused foam in-house. While black foam melts a lot easier than white, it’s much more sustainable to get our recycled foam, as it’s been repurposed multiple times. We love staying sustainable here at Sterling, and our various foam by-products are always repurposed for other projects.
We hope this quick rundown of our different foam colors helped you understand exactly which foam color does what in all the different workplaces. While these are our staple foam colors, we often get custom-dyed colors for specific commissions, like foam fingers in school spirit colors! If you’d like to learn more about foam, recycling, or everything else we do here at Sterling, be sure to contact us or follow us on social media – we’d love to gush more about foam and packaging solutions if given the chance.
