The purchase price of a film roll is the smallest number in the equation. Here is where the rest of it actually goes.
Draft · 6 min read
Ask most logistics teams what stretch film costs and you'll get the price of a roll. It's the wrong number. The roll is the cheapest part of single-use load containment — the expensive part is everything that happens around it, every shift, on every load.
Total Cost of Ownership for single-use film bundles in a long list of line items that rarely sit on the same spreadsheet: the labour hours spent wrapping and re-wrapping, waste-management surcharges, EPR tariffs, plastic and CO₂ taxes, product damage from unstable loads, and the housekeeping cost of film offcuts across the floor.
Counted together, securing a single roll container with film averages around €0.99 per trip in a market like Austria. A reusable, service-based approach starts at roughly €0.33 per trip. The gap isn't a discount — it's the cost that was always there, just never line-itemed.
Manual wrapping is slow and repetitive. Where a manual wrap can take around a minute per load, a click-on reusable panel secures the same roll container in roughly ten seconds. Multiply the difference across a day's dispatch volume and the reclaimed labour alone often outweighs the entire film budget — before a single waste or compliance line is added.
The PPWR moves single-use film from "operational expense" to "regulatory exposure." With reuse targets due by 2030 and reporting obligations under Articles 29–31, the question stops being "what does film cost?" and becomes "what does it cost to keep using it while the rules tighten?"
Every operation's TCO is different. The fastest way to see yours is to model it against your real volumes, wage rates and waste costs rather than industry averages.