This might sound like a dumb question but I’ve been going back and forth with our purchasing manager about how often we should actually be replacing our crates, because we’ve got some that are easily five or six years old and while they still look fine on the surface, I can’t help but wonder if there’s some invisible degradation happening that we just can’t see with the naked eye. We’re a pretty busy processing facility in Dubai Industrial City, handling everything from marinated meats to prepared seafood products, and we go through a lot of heavy usage day in and day out with constant washing, stacking, and moving around. I was reading through some industry resources and came across a really thorough piece about plastic packaging HACCP compliance that mentioned how repeated exposure to cleaning chemicals and temperature changes can gradually break down the plastic at a microscopic level, which honestly got me a bit paranoid about whether we’re holding onto our containers for too long. I want to make sure we’re using proper food safe plastic containers for processing facilities Dubai that we can trust, but I also don’t want to be replacing them more often than necessary just because of some theoretical concern. Is there a general rule of thumb for how long these things last under heavy use, or are there specific signs I should be looking for that tell me it’s time to retire a crate? I’d rather be proactive about this than have a contamination issue down the line, but I also need to be practical about our budget because replacing everything every couple of years would really add up.