Beverage Conveyor Belts: Sugar, Breakage and Washdown Duty

01Why Beverage Belts Wear Out From Inside the Cover

A beverage line asks almost nothing of a belt in the mechanical sense. There is no primary crusher discharging onto it, no half-metre lump, no drop height worth a risk assessment. The belt runs flat or in a shallow trough, at a speed the filler sets, over pulleys small enough to fit under a table. Loads are counted in grams per container. And still the belts come off these lines with grooves deep enough to show carcass, edges frayed back to the first ply, and a cover that has gone from white to a grey-brown varnish nobody can scrub off. The first explanation offered on the floor is nearly always abrasion, and the first order placed is nearly always a thicker, more abrasion-resistant conveyor belt, when the problem is a surface that holds on to whatever lands on it.

That order buys one extra season at best and makes the next failure worse, because a thicker cover simply holds more of the residue that caused the problem. In our work as a conveyor belt manufacturer quoting replacement belts into bottling halls, the pattern is consistent enough to state plainly. A belt on a sugar-bearing line is not worn out by sliding contact with the product. It is worn out by the product that stayed behind.

The sequence is short and it repeats. Syrup residue leaves a film on the carrying cover. The water in that film leaves, partly by evaporation and partly by being drawn into the carcass at a cut edge. What remains is a layer that is no longer a liquid and not yet a solid, and it is tacky enough to hold anything that lands on it. Dust from the carton erector, label fibre from the labeller, glass fines from the culler, aluminium swarf from the can transfer and mineral solids from the wash water all collect in that layer. Every time the belt passes a pulley the loaded film is pressed into the rubber and cures there. From that point the belt is not running against its scraper with a rubber surface. It is running against its scraper with an abrasive paste glued to its own cover, and the scraper does what any blade does when it is dragged across a grit-loaded surface.

It cuts a groove. The groove then becomes the wear path, and the wear path becomes the failure.

What comes back to the workshop is diagnostic if you measure it properly. The groove sits exactly where the scraper blade or the side skirt rides, and its width matches the blade rather than the container path. Cover thickness two hundred millimetres to either side is close to original. The walls of the groove are polished and slightly rounded, which is what a polyurethane blade does to rubber when grit is trapped between them. On one citrus line we opened a belt whose cover under the blade measured a little under two millimetres against a nominal six, while the same belt still measured five and a half millimetres across the rest of its width. That is not product abrasion. The product never touched that strip.

Everything else in this article follows from that single observation. If a sugar film is the root cause, then cover hardness, surface finish, edge construction, scraper pressure, washdown sequence and inspection interval all have to be chosen against the film rather than against the product. A belt that is correctly specified for wet sand is wrong here, even though the sand is more abrasive than the syrup will ever be.

I have cut open belts from a citrus juice line running three products a week, a brewery can line on two shifts, and a hot-fill tea line that changed over daily. Same three-stage sequence in all three. The timelines differed by a factor of roughly four, and the factor was not tonnage or belt price. It was how the line was washed, and how the scraper was set against the cover.

Send us your line data and we will recommend a cover compound and carcass for it

02What Actually Lands on the Cover, Stream by Stream

A point that surprises buyers new to the sector is that a beverage conveyor belt almost never touches the beverage itself. On a bottle line it touches the base of the container and, on accumulation tables, the side wall. On a can line it touches the dome and the base rim. So the residue arriving on the cover is not the recipe. It is the overflow from the filler valves, the foam that collapsed on the way out of the neck, the rinse water carried down from the capper, the adhesive left on a returned bottle, and the thin film of product that creeps under the container by capillary action and stays there when the container moves on. All of that is a small fraction of throughput and a large fraction of the belt's problem, because it is deposited in exactly the same place, shift after shift.

Concentration matters more than volume. A spill of 65 Brix simple syrup at the filler outlet is perhaps a few millilitres an hour, which sounds negligible until you work out that it is spread over a strip a hundred millimetres wide and that its water leaves within minutes in a dry hall. What is left is a film with a sugar concentration high enough to behave like a slow adhesive. Diluted splash from a rinse station is a different problem, because it carries sugar into the weave at the edge and feeds a biofilm that no amount of dry brushing will remove. Between those two extremes sit the majority of beverage duties we quote, and they need different covers.

Acidity runs alongside the sugar and is often overlooked. Carbonated soft drinks, citrus juices, sports drinks and fermented products all sit in a range that will attack the wrong polymer slowly rather than dramatically. The result is not a hole. It is a cover that goes slightly chalky, loses tensile strength at the surface, and then releases the very fillers that were meant to make it abrasion resistant. Once that happens, the sugar crust has a softer substrate to embed into, and the two mechanisms accelerate each other.

The table below is the one we use during a site visit, filled in for the streams we see most. It is deliberately written around what the cover receives rather than around the product name, because two plants making the same drink can present completely different belt duties depending on filling temperature, container material and whether the line accumulates under pressure.

Reading down that table, the common factor is not the sugar itself. It is the alternation between wet and dry. A belt that stays wet is merely wet. A belt that goes wet, dries to a tacky state, is loaded with grit while tacky, and then dries hard has been converted into a grinding wheel. That is why a line running one product continuously for three weeks often shows less cover loss than a line running the same product on eight-hour campaigns with a wash between each one.

Choosing between the belt families available for this work is a separate decision from choosing a supplier, and both matter. Buyers who are still at the stage of comparing what the market offers usually start with a conveyor belt supplier catalogue and then discover that the catalogue does not describe residue behaviour at all. The wider context of how belts are classified for continuous service is covered in our overview of the industrial conveyor belt range, which is worth reading before you narrow the choice to one compound.

03From Tacky Film to Grit Crust to Scraper Groove

Breaking the failure into stages is useful because each stage has a different countermeasure, and most plants spend their maintenance budget on the wrong one. Buying a harder cover addresses stage two. Buying a belt washer addresses stage one. Adjusting the scraper addresses stage three. Only one of those three actually removes the cause, and it is not the one that gets approved first.

Stage one: the film that never quite dries

A sugar solution left on a rubber surface does not simply evaporate to powder. As water leaves, viscosity rises steeply and the residue passes through a window, often several hours long in a dry hall, in which it is sticky but not yet glassy. In that window it is a collector. Anything smaller than the film thickness that lands on it is captured permanently, and anything larger is captured at its contact points. The film also wicks into any opening in the belt, which means a cut edge, a worn splice step, a stitch hole or a mechanically fastened joint becomes a reservoir that stays wet long after the surface has dried.

On site, the test for stage one is crude and reliable. Wipe a dry gloved hand across the container path at the discharge end and look at the glove. A white belt should leave nothing but a faint grey mark. A tacky film leaves a brown smear that beads when you rub your fingers together. If the smear is there after a shift, the line is already in stage one, whatever the belt looks like.

Stage two: the film becomes a loaded crust

The second stage is where the belt acquires its abrasive. Particles are pressed into the softened cover by the container load, not by impact. A 500 millilitre bottle exerts a contact pressure that is trivial in absolute terms but is applied through a small contact patch, thousands of times per hour, onto rubber that has been plasticised by sugar and water. Under that repeated loading the particles sink until they are flush with the surface, and then they are held mechanically. The cover no longer presents rubber to the scraper. It presents a mosaic of glass, aluminium, mineral scale and label fibre, bound in a sugar matrix that hardens as it ages. Every pass over a conveyor pulley presses that layer a little flatter and a little harder, on the carry side and again on the return side.

The measurement that confirms stage two is cover hardness against a clean reference. On the lines we have surveyed, a cover that started in the high fifties on the Shore A scale often reads in the low seventies once that crust has cured in, and it reads unevenly, with the container path harder than the shoulders. That hardening is not the rubber curing further. It is filler loading from the product side, and it is irreversible. You cannot wash it back to the original reading.

Stage three: the scraper becomes a cutting tool

A polyurethane or rubber scraper running on clean rubber with light pressure removes liquid and does almost no damage. The same blade running on a grit-loaded cover with the same pressure removes rubber at a rate set by the grit size, and it does so in a line no wider than the blade. Blade pressure is usually set once at commissioning by the fitter who installs it, and then never revisited as the belt stretches and the blade wears. By the time the belt has taken up twenty millimetres of stretch, the blade that was set with a light kiss may be pressing hard enough to bow the belt between the support rollers.

The same mechanism operates at the edges, where side skirts and guide rails bear on the belt. Edge wear in a bottling hall is frequently blamed on mistracking. Mistracking is often the consequence rather than the cause, because a belt whose edges have swollen with absorbed sugar water no longer runs true, and the correction applied is more guide pressure, which accelerates the very wear that caused the drift.

One more mechanism belongs in this section because it is frequently misread as a drive problem. On lines with accumulation tables and transfer units, container spacing is controlled by short centre-distance belts running at slightly different speeds, and the slip between belt and container is intentional. That slip generates a fine rubber and product dust that settles on every surface below. If the drives themselves are serviced with belts from a transmission belt manufacturer or a V-belt manufacturer whose tolerances differ from the original, speed matching drifts, containers scuff, and the dust load on the main carrying belt goes up without anyone changing the product. Whenever we are called to a line with unexplained cover loss, we ask for the drive belt history as well as the process data.

For a belt that has to survive this sequence, the starting point is a compound chosen for wet sugar and mild acid rather than for sliding abrasion. That is a narrower requirement than it sounds, and the standard rubber conveyor belt construction used in heavy bulk service is usually the wrong answer, not because it is poor quality but because its cover is formulated to resist cutting and gouging by rock, and those same formulations tend to be harder and less able to shed a sticky film.

04Glass: The Fragment That Keeps Working

Returnable glass brings a failure mode that no other beverage packaging reproduces, and it is the reason glass lines need a different inspection routine from PET or can lines even when the beverage conveyor belt specification is identical. When a bottle breaks on a can and bottle conveyor belt, the fragments do not stay where the bottle was. The larger pieces are picked off by hand within minutes. The small ones, the slivers under five millimetres and the dust that comes off a star crack, are distributed along the belt for metres and are then carried into places nobody inspects.

Three destinations matter. Fragments lodge in the weave at a cut edge, where they are held by protruding yarn and are almost impossible to brush out. They accumulate in the gap between the belt and the side skirt, where they are crushed against the edge on every pass. And they embed in the cover itself, where they become the hardest constituent of the crust described in the previous section. Glass is harder than any rubber compound we supply, so once it is embedded the cover has no chance of wearing the particle away. The particle wears the cover.

The design response is not a thicker cover. It is a belt that gives fragments fewer places to hide and an inspection regime that removes them before they are pressed in. An endless spliced belt with sealed edges removes the step and the stitch holes. A cover with a genuinely closed surface, rather than a matt textured one, leaves fewer anchor points. Where breakage is frequent, an impact and cut resistant conveyor belt with a thicker breaker ply is worth the extra weight. Above all, the belt must be liftable and the frame must be open enough to inspect the return side, because the majority of glass we find has migrated to the return run and is being carried back into the tail pulley where it is crushed between belt and lagging.

Metal detection and X-ray inspection add a constraint that is easy to forget at the specification stage. The belt passes through the detector aperture, so anything metallic in the belt is a permanent false signal, and anything that can flake off and travel with the product is a contamination risk that no detector will catch once it is inside a sealed container. That rules out metallic fasteners on any line where the belt runs through an inspection head, and it argues for a splice that is made in the belt rather than bolted onto it.

We build these belts in a plant that also supplies heavy bulk sectors, and the difference in what the two customers need is stark. A conveyor belt factory that only knows quarry duty will offer thickness as the answer to everything. In a bottling hall, thickness is rarely the variable that decides belt life. Surface, edge and splice decide it.

05Washdown on a Sugar Line Cuts Both Ways

The instinct when a belt is sticky is to wash it harder, and on a beverage line that instinct is responsible for a large share of the premature failures we see. Water dissolves sugar efficiently, which is why washing works at all. The same water carries that sugar into the carcass, and it carries dissolved minerals from the supply into the cover, where they remain after the water leaves. A belt that is washed aggressively and dried poorly ends up with a cover that is both softened at the surface and loaded with calcium scale, and scale is abrasive in its own right.

The balance is not difficult to strike once the mechanics are clear. Warm water at moderate temperature dissolves sugar far faster than cold water, and a short dwell with a moderate flow removes more residue than a long soak with a high flow. What matters most is what happens in the twenty minutes after the wash, because a belt that is left wet in a still hall dries slowly, and slow drying gives dissolved sugar time to migrate to the surface and concentrate there. That is how a washed belt can be tackier at the start of the next shift than it was at the end of the last one.

Chemistry choice follows the residue rather than the hygiene schedule. Chlorinated alkaline foam lifts sugar and protein well but leaves salt behind if the rinse is short. Peracetic acid products leave little residue and control biofilm in the weave, which matters on lines where the belt never fully dries between campaigns. Acid descalers remove mineral scale effectively, and a chemical resistant conveyor belt compound is the right choice where descaling has to be routine rather than occasional. They are the correct response to a cover that has gone rough, but only on a belt whose compound is actually formulated to tolerate repeated acid contact. We have seen a line where a daily acid rinse was added to solve a scale complaint and the cover life fell by roughly a third, because the acid was attacking the compound rather than the scale.

Where the water should not go

Three places take water that the belt cannot afford. The cut edge is the first, because an open edge wicks liquid along the fabric by capillary action and holds it there against gravity. The splice is the second, particularly a stepped splice where the step faces the direction of travel and scoops water as the belt passes the scraper. The fastener is the third, and it is the worst, because a metal fastener creates a gap that never drains and a corrosion site that stains the belt and eventually loosens.

Nozzle placement decides most of this before the chemistry does. Spray directed at the carrying cover from above at a shallow angle cleans the surface and pushes residue toward the edge, where it can be removed by a skirt and drained. Spray directed upward from below at high pressure drives water into the return side and into every opening. We ask for the wash drawing before we quote a belt on any line with an automatic washer, because a belt specified for wet duty and a belt specified for washdown are not the same product.

Drainage is the other half of the design and it is almost always a frame issue rather than a belt issue. A belt sitting in a puddle on the return run is being washed continuously whether the shift is running or not. A frame with a fall toward a drain, drip trays under the carry run and no flat surfaces where liquid can stand will do more for belt life than any change of compound. On the lines we have re-surveyed after a frame modification of this kind, the cover life improved without any change to the belt specification at all.

Spare strategy interacts with washdown in a way that catches plants out. The spare is usually stored in the same humid area as the line, coiled on a pallet with no protection, and a belt that has absorbed moisture will not run true when it is fitted, which is then read as a manufacturing fault. Splice work is the other variable, and it is worth using a supplier who can send a splice and belt service crew rather than training line fitters on a production belt. Belt stock should be kept dry, off the floor, and rotated so that the oldest is used first. Buyers consolidating this kind of stock usually do it through a wholesale conveyor belts arrangement rather than one-off orders, which also keeps the splice specification consistent across lines. A plant that buys on a conveyor belt distributor basis rather than line by line also finds it easier to standardise the splice, because the same crew makes it every time.

06Why This Is Not a Dairy Line

Beverage and dairy are often lumped together in procurement because both are wet, both are hygienic and both need white belts. The overlap ends there, and specifying one like the other is the most common expensive mistake in this sector. The difference is not the amount of water. It is what the residue is made of and what the cleaning regime does to the belt in response.

Dairy residue is fat and protein. It forms a biofilm that adheres strongly to rubber, it is not soluble in water at any temperature you can safely spray at a belt, and it is removed by saponification and hydrolysis under hot alkaline circulation. That is why dairy plants run clean-in-place circuits at elevated temperature with caustic concentration held in a narrow band, and it is why dairy belts are chosen for resistance to hot alkali and for the ability to survive being flooded inside a tunnel washer on a fixed cycle. The entire belt, both faces, sees the chemistry. Our separate article on dairy conveyor belts and the fat, protein and CIP duty covers that chemistry in detail, and anyone specifying for a dairy hall should read it instead of this one.

A beverage line is nearly the opposite in every dimension that matters. The residue is sugar and acid, both of which are water soluble, so cleaning is a dissolution problem rather than a chemical attack problem. Cleaning is intermittent and often manual or semi-automatic, aimed at the carry surface rather than the whole belt. The line runs dry for most of the shift, at higher speed, with containers that are rigid and can break. Where a dairy belt is asked to be chemically inert for hours at temperature, a beverage belt is asked to shed a film, resist a mild acid, tolerate being wetted and dried repeatedly, and not damage the container.

The consequence for compound choice is direct. A compound optimised for hot caustic resistance is not necessarily good at shedding sugar, and a compound chosen for sugar release may be mediocre in a caustic circulation loop. This is why we keep the two specifications separate in our own sample library rather than offering a single hygienic white compound for both sectors.

A third comparison is worth making because it clarifies what "gentle handling" means in practice. On an egg line the belt is asked to preserve a fragile shell through curves and transfers, and the belt is soft and the transfer geometry is carefully controlled. Beverage containers are rigid, so the belt does not need to cushion them. What it needs is to keep them upright at speed and to avoid the small horizontal scuffs that come from differential slip. That is a tracking and friction question, not a softness question, and it is why a belt that works well on an egg conveyor belt with gentle handling curves is not automatically suitable for a bottle line.

Because the two sectors diverge this sharply, the first question we ask a new account is which one they are in, and the second is whether they run both under the same roof. Plants that bottle dairy-adjacent drinks, flavoured milk or fermented products often sit across the boundary, and they need two specifications in the same building. In that situation it helps to work with a distributor who can hold both specifications and keep them identified at the splice, so that a belt from one line is never fitted to the other during a breakdown repair.

07White Rubber, PVC or Modular: Where Each One Stops

Four families turn up on bottling conveyor belt layouts and on canning lines, and the argument between them is usually conducted on price and colour when it should be conducted on residue release and splice quality. White food-grade rubber remains the default on bottle lines because it grips a wet container base better than any thermoplastic surface and because it can be spliced endless in a workshop, which removes the step that collects sugar and glass. A white rubber conveyor belt in a nitrile compound is the version we quote most for lines carrying oily or fatty products alongside sugar, because the nitrile base resists swelling where a natural rubber blend would soften.

PVC is the pragmatic choice where the belt runs over small pulleys, needs to be thin, or has to be welded into an endless loop on site. It is chemically tolerant, it does not support the biofilm growth that rubber can, and it cleans down quickly because the surface is closed. The limits appear at the edges and at temperature. A PVC belt run at a tight centre distance with a guide rail bearing on a cut edge will fray, and once the edge is open the plasticiser has somewhere to go. If the line also runs warm rinses, the combination of warmth, edge damage and time is what ends the belt rather than cover wear.

Buyers sourcing PVC for a food line should look past the colour and ask what the compound is intended for, because the same white sheet is sold into industrial conveying and into food contact work with different formulations. Our note on selecting a PVC conveyor belt supplier for food applications sets out the questions worth asking, and the wider PVC conveyor belts range shows where the thin-wall and high-grip variants sit.

Polyurethane earns its place on cutting and abrasion duty and on lines where a knife-edge transfer is needed, but it is the family most sensitive to warm wet conditions, because polyester-based PU will hydrolyse when it is stored or run damp. We have replaced PU belts on rinse-heavy lines at less than a year old for exactly that reason, with no fault in the belt other than the environment it was asked to live in. Modular plastic belting, covered in our modular conveyor belt selection guide, solves the curve and transfer-gap problems that fabric belts cannot, and it can be repaired link by link, but the open hinges hold sugar and glass fines and need a wash routine designed around them.

Specifying a beverage conveyor belt usually comes down to two questions that a catalogue cannot answer. Does the line accumulate under pressure, and does the belt have to survive a washer. If the answer to the first is yes, grip matters more than chemical tolerance and white rubber wins. If the answer to the second is yes, the belt has to be specified as a wet-duty item with a sealed edge and a splice that tolerates immersion, and the family matters less than the construction detail. Where a line also runs a steam-heated tunnel or a hot-fill section, the compound question overlaps with the one covered in our guide to EPDM belts for heat, ozone and steam resistance, which is a separate decision from residue release.

Private-label production adds a constraint that is easy to overlook. When one line runs several brands, changeover frequency rises, wash frequency rises with it, and the belt is expected to look presentable for a customer audit at any time. That combination is hard on white rubber, and it is the reason some plants move to a closed-surface belt for the branded packs and keep a heavier rubber belt for the bulk run. The thinking behind that split is set out in our article on private label food conveyor belts, which deals with changeover duty rather than with continuous running.

None of this can be settled without knowing how the containers arrive and leave the belt. That is packaging work as much as conveying work, and the interface between the two is where most mis-specified belts originate. Our food packaging conveyor solutions page describes the transfers, merges and accumulation sections that sit around the belt itself, and it is worth a look before a belt is chosen in isolation from the line it sits in.

08Run-In, Scraper Setting and the Inspection Route

A correctly specified belt can be destroyed in the first week by a scraper set too hard, and this happens more often than a wrong compound choice. The blade should kiss the cover with just enough pressure to lift liquid, and that setting should be made with the belt at running tension rather than slack. On a can line last year we found three scrapers that had been set at commissioning and never touched since, with the belt having taken up enough stretch that each blade was bearing hard enough to leave a visible bow between support rollers, with the conveyor rollers showing a visible load line. Re-setting them to a light even contact arrested cover loss that had been blamed on the product for two campaigns.

Run-in of a beverage conveyor belt deserves its own attention on short centre distances with small pulleys, because that is where a new belt is worked hardest. The first fifty hours should be run at the line's normal speed but with reduced accumulation pressure where the controls allow it, and the take-up should be checked daily, since a new belt will elongate and a slack belt mistracks. Skirt gaps should be set with a feeler gauge at several points along the run rather than at one, because frames are rarely as straight as the drawing suggests, and a gap that is correct at the head end may be closed at the tail.

The inspection route is where the economics of all this are decided. A belt that is checked properly at four points will be replaced on a planned stop; a belt that is only looked at when it fails will be replaced during production. Our recommendation to plants running sugar-bearing products is a short weekly check of the blade line and the skirt line, a monthly measurement of cover thickness at three points across the width, and a full survey at every campaign change. The weekly check takes one person ten minutes with a torch and a glove.

Record keeping is what turns these checks into a specification, and it belongs inside the quality assurance routine rather than in a maintenance folder. A plant that logs cover thickness, blade setting and wash chemistry for a year can tell a supplier exactly what its belt has to survive, and can hold that supplier to it. Without records, every replacement is a guess dressed up as experience, and the same failure returns with a new belt on it.

Ask for a belt specification review against your wash and scraper routine

09Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the wear groove only as wide as the scraper blade?

Because the blade, not the container, is what removes the rubber. Sugar residue cures into a loaded crust across the container path, and the crust is abrasive only where something presses it hard against the cover. A scraper or a side skirt provides that pressure in a strip exactly its own width, so the loss concentrates there while the cover either side stays close to nominal thickness. In the belts we have sectioned, the groove walls were polished and rounded, which is the signature of a polyurethane blade working with grit trapped underneath. If the loss were caused by the containers sliding, it would be spread across the full path and would be heaviest where the containers sit.

Can these belts be cleaned with the same chemicals as the rest of the line?

Usually not without a change of routine. Chlorinated alkaline foam lifts sugar well but leaves salt if the rinse is short, and a routine acid descale will attack rubber that was not formulated for repeated acid contact. On one line a daily acid rinse added for a scale complaint took roughly a third off cover life, because the acid was working on the compound rather than on the deposit. Warm water with a moderate dwell and a proper rinse removes sugar more effectively than a long soak, and what happens in the twenty minutes after the wash matters as much as the chemistry, since slow drying lets dissolved sugar migrate back to the surface and concentrate.

How do we tell sugar damage from ordinary abrasion?

Three checks separate them. Wipe a dry gloved hand across the container path at the discharge end and look for a brown smear that beads between your fingers, which indicates a tacky film. Measure hardness against a clean reference sample, since a crust-loaded cover often reads ten to fifteen points higher on the Shore A scale and reads unevenly across the width. Then measure cover thickness at several points, because sugar damage gives you a deep local groove beside near-nominal cover, while true sliding abrasion gives you a broad, even reduction with no polished walls.

Do glass and can lines need different belt constructions?

They can use the same compound but not the same construction detail. Glass brings fragments that lodge in an open weave, pack into the skirt gap and embed in the cover, so a sealed edge, an endless splice and a closed surface matter more than thickness. Can lines run faster with lighter contact pressure but generate aluminium fines and lubricant that collect in the low points of the return run, which makes drainage and return-side inspection the deciding items. On any line running through a metal detector, a mechanical fastener is ruled out because it creates a permanent false signal.

Is a thicker cover a sensible way to extend life?

It buys one season at best and often makes the next failure worse, because a thicker cover holds more residue and gives the crust more material to embed into. The failure is driven by what sits on the surface, not by how much rubber is underneath it, so a thicker belt with the same surface and the same scraper setting will develop the same groove, just later and deeper. Money is better spent on a cover that sheds the film, an edge that stays sealed, and a blade set with a light even kiss at running tension.

What information do you need to recommend a belt for our line?

The container type and material, the products run and how often they change over, the belt width and centre distance, the pulley diameters at both ends, whether the line accumulates under pressure, the wash method and chemistry, and the last three belt lives with the failure pattern for each. Photographs of the failed belt at the blade line and the skirt line are worth more than a written description. With those inputs we can separate a residue problem from a mechanical one before quoting, which is the only way the replacement avoids repeating the history.