Given the rising popularity of noise-cancelling headphones, it’s clear that consumers are looking for more ways to make the world around them a little bit quieter. It’s why many laptops now feature fan-less designs, and why Uline, a company known for its shipping materials, has gone to the trouble of engineering packing tape that barely makes a whisper as it’s peeled off the roll.
The screeching sound associated with using a tape gun to seal up a box is known to anyone who’s ever packed up and moved to a new home, but at worst it’s a sound most people have to endure every few years. If you work in a company’s shipping department, however, or for companies like UPS and FedEx, enduring the screech of a tape gun is a daily ordeal, and while your ears may eventually tune it out, at no point does it ever become a pleasant sound.
Despite the issue’s lack of urgency, Uline is tackling the problem is its new Uline Quiet Tape that, as the video below demonstrates, peels easier than standard packing tape, making it nearly noiseless as it comes off the roll.
So what’s the secret sauce that makes Uline’s Quiet Tape so hush-hush? Instead of changing the formulation of the sticky solvent acrylic adhesive that would potentially hinder the tape’s ability to stick to cardboard boxes, the company has instead added an “easy release coating” to the smooth shiny side of the tape so that it releases from itself with much less resistance and nearly no noise at all.
The Uline Quiet Tape is available in two different widths — five or seven centimetres — and while it’s available in bulk (you can never have too much packing tape during a move) the ‘new and improved’ aspect means that treating your ears to peace and quiet is going to cost you a small premium. A two-inch roll of Uline’s “best-selling” standard packing tape costs $2 per roll if you buy 36 or more, but pricing on the Quiet Tape is closer to $5/roll when purchased in those quantities. So the unpleasant screech of a tape gun may just be replaced with the audible gasps of sticker shock.