Cartons & Boxes
Cardboard box packaging for shipping, storage and retail. Mailing boxes, cartons and egg cartons in stock sizes, delivered Australia-wide from Hobart.
Cardboard box packaging is the backbone of any business that ships, stores or moves product, and getting the size and board grade right is what keeps freight costs and damage claims down. Associated Plastics stocks cartons and boxes for the jobs Australian businesses run into most: mailing boxes for online orders, general purpose shipping cartons, storage and archive boxes, and egg cartons for producers and farm gate sales. Our cardboard box shop range is held in Hobart and dispatched Australia-wide, flat packed so it stores tidily until you need it. Buying from a packaging supplier rather than a retail stationery shelf gets you the correct board grade for the weight you are sending, honest carton-quantity pricing, and sizes that actually match your product instead of forcing you into void fill. The guide below covers how carton sizes are measured, when to step up from single wall to double wall board, and how to keep dimensional freight charges under control.
5 products
How cardboard box sizes are measured
Carton dimensions are always quoted as internal length x width x height in millimetres, in that order, and always internal rather than external. That matters when you are matching a box to a product: a 300 x 200 x 150 mm carton holds a 300 mm long item with nothing to spare, so allow 10 to 20 mm on each dimension for protective packaging. For mailing boxes, keep the height as low as your product allows, since Australian couriers charge on cubic volume as well as weight and a half empty tall box costs the same to send as a full one.
Single wall or double wall board
Single wall board has one layer of fluting between two liners and handles the majority of retail, mailing and light storage work up to roughly 15 to 20 kg depending on the flute grade. Double wall board runs two layers of fluting and is the right call for heavier contents, stacked pallet loads, long transit distances or anything being handled repeatedly. If your cartons are arriving crushed on the bottom of a pallet, the fix is almost always board grade rather than more tape. Flute profile also matters: fine flutes give a smoother printable face for retail, coarser flutes give more cushioning and stacking strength.
Storing and assembling flat packed cartons
All cartons ship flat and knock up by hand. Store them flat, off a concrete floor and out of humid areas, because cardboard absorbs moisture and loses a meaningful amount of its stacking strength once damp. Tape the base seam along its full length rather than a single strip across the middle, and for heavier loads run a second strip across the two base flaps in an H pattern.
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