Which Material is Best for Display Boxes: Acrylic or Glass

Display boxes play a huge role in the success of any product in retail stores. If the display boxes make the product visible to the customers easily and in the most magnificent way, then there is no way that your item will fail in the market. This show how strongly display boxes impact business success. Display boxes are available in different materials, but in this article, we compare and contrast glass and acrylic material and their role as major display box materials.

What is Acrylic Material?

Acrylic is a famous material when it comes to packaging boxes. It is a transparent plastic but of high quality. It is manufactured by fabricating, melting, and cooling the plastic material. This material is made up of acrylic fiber. This fiber is synthetic in nature and is highly flexible and heat tolerant. The polymers that make up acrylic material must contain 85% of the acrylonitrile monomer out of the total 100% of acrylic. Otherwise, the properties of the original acrylic material vary.

What is Glass Material?

Who must not be familiar with glass? Glass is the most widely used material in packaging and many other industries. This fragile yet remarkable material contains measured amounts of soda ash, silica sand, limestone, crinkles of old glass, and dolomite. This composition makes glass an environmentally friendly material, unlike acrylic, which is pure plastic and hardly decomposes.

Different factors of Acrylic and Glass

Both glass and acrylic materials are famous, easily available, and inexpensive. This benefits the packaging industry a lot and holds equal significance, but when it comes to manufacturing display boxes, the result might vary, and one may dominate the other. Multiple factors will help understand what is best to manufacture display boxes.

Strength

When it comes to displaying boxes, the strength of the boxes tops the list of all the important components. Many display boxes are hung for various purposes, and for this task, they need to be strong enough to cater to the gravitational pull downwards.

The strength of the glass and acrylic does not vary a lot. Both are strong materials and can hold sufficient weight without any breakage. But acrylic is slightly stronger than glass because it is less brittle, and there are lesser chances that it breaks. It can sustain multiple hits and retain the same shape, unlike glass, which can break into pieces even after one wrong hit. Therefore, glass display boxes can manage lesser weight than acrylic display boxes. Glass display boxes, when hung, can never be ignored and require much attention. This burdens the employees as well. It is better to use acrylic display boxes if you want strength.

Transparency

Display boxes have to be transparent. This is because their sole purpose is to present the items to the customers without unpacking. This helps grab customer attention feasibly and lessen the workload on employees. Glass and acrylic are transparent materials and fairly serve the purpose of a clear display of items to the customers. But, if you choose a more transparent display box, go for acrylic boxes. This is because acrylic is more transparent than glass. Where glass allows only 80-90% light to refract, acrylic allows 92% light to refract. Moreover, the glass refraction can even lessen depending on which type of glass you use for your display boxes.

Easy Cleaning

The easier it is to clean display boxes, the more their reusability is. Increased reusability of the display boxes saves the cost and benefits the companies. Therefore, companies focus on this while choosing display boxes for their products. Display boxes require frequent cleaning because they are always placed on the front and exposed to dust and dirt. This makes them dirty, and the shop runners must clean them twice or thrice daily.

Glass is much easier to clean than acrylic. This is because it can be cleaned with clear water and retain its shine and texture. On the other hand, if acrylic is not cleaned properly and with proper solvents, then its texture deteriorates. It is quite hard to clean acrylic with water or simple detergent. Moreover, you have to be extremely gentle while cleaning acrylic material. Therefore, if you have to place display boxes on the counter that do not need to be replaced repeatedly, then the g is the best material for the display boxes and is much more cost-effective.

Recyclability

Recyclability saves the cost on the companies. They can return the old boxes, buy the new ones at lower prices, and save costs. Hence, companies choose display boxes made of material that can easily be recycled. Both glass and acrylic are super feasible to recycle. Hence, both can be used to manufacture the display boxes.

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it can be concluded that acrylic is normally the best material to manufacture display boxes because it is superior to glass in many factors. But glass has superiority in some cases too. Hence, it is more subjective which material is suitable and mostly depends on the usage of the display boxes. 

0