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Foam is one of the most versatile materials around. It comes in a huge range of grades and types, from those suitable for packaging more valuable products to carefully produced medical foams. However, there are also a lot of uses for foam that are all about fun.

There are three properties of foam products that make them absolutely ideal for novelty uses. First of all, it is a very lightweight material that can be easily shaped – and cut – into all manner of forms. Second, it’s spongy and flexible, which makes it very safe for kids to use and play with. All kinds of foam toys are pretty harmless. They are soft and hard to hurt yourself or anyone else with – even on purpose. Third, as a material, basic foam is pretty cheap. That means low value items can be produced for special events.

Souvenir giant foam hands are the classic toy for sports matches. They make ideal souvenirs and provide a big, bright splash of team colours. They are also hard to throw with any force, so stadium security look upon them fondly!

As children’s toys, foam products are cheap, bright, and very safe.  Kids love having fights with floppy bats and novelty swords made from soft foam. We’ve all done it once or twice – even the grown ups like to have a go and indulge in a bit of harmless horseplay or an ostentatious mock duel or two. There are a huge range of fun items that can be made fairly quickly and easily from simple foam sheets.

Many foam products are waterproof, and because of all the tiny little holes full of air, they can be very buoyant and provide an outstanding degree of floatation. Closed cell foams make an ideal source of buoyancy for making swimming aids for small children. The alternative is the inflatable bag idea, but anything inflatable can be punctured or develop a leak around the valve. The small cell, lightweight foam we supply for this kind of use can’t be punctured and fill up with water; even if there is a hole right through, it’ll stay buoyant. Obviously that adds an important degree of safety.

For adults, and more confident swimmers, the same type of foam is used to make kickboards. These boat shapes are made from foam cut to size from a thick  sheet. They are used by those learning to swim and people in swim squads and competitive teams looking to improve their stroke and swimming technique.

And of course, there are the foam pool toys. Some of the best are simply huge foam sheets that kids can climb – and try to stand -on. They are like a super-safe surfboard in the pool, and half a dozen kids can play at once. They also provide floating islands in the open pool space – a great confidence booster for children who are nervous in the water.

Closed cell foam logs or ‘pool noodles’ can be used for play or for a little extra floatation. Bendy, highly buoyant, and brightly coloured, almost all swimming pools have a collection. More recently they have become popular tools in aqua-aerobics classes too.

There are two main types of foam. Some foam manufacturers make both, some only one. We supply all kinds of foam for all kinds of applications, from novelty items to bath and cleaning sponges. Different foams can be used in medicine, packaging, mattresses, toys, insulation, and countless other places all around us. If you look around the room, you’ll probably see at least one or two products that contain some kind of foam.

Closed and open cell foams are produced using different methods, and with very different (in fact, often almost opposite) aims in mind. What they share is a flexible base material and a construction method that introduces lots of small bubbles into that stuff, which is almost always a plastic of some kind. The size of the bubbles varies from those that are almost too small to see, to those big enough to stick your thumb into.

That’s not the differentiating factor though: what sets open and closed cell foams apart from one another is the connectivity between the bubbles. Open cells have open paths between them, closed cells don’t. In practical terms, that means that you can use open cell foams to soak up liquids, while closed cell foams are waterproof and won’t absorb water even when punctured or otherwise damaged. So one kind is used to make cleaning sponges and the other is used to make buoyancy aids for canoeists, to give two of the many examples. We could list plenty more for both types of foam, but most foams are of the closed cell variety.

Natural sponges have a long history, both in evolutionary terms and in relation to human activities. The creatures that provide old-fashioned natural bath sponges begin life in the oceans. As a family of animal species, these sea sponges have been around for hundreds of millions of years, more or less unchanged. Humans have only been around in a form we’d recognise for a scant half a million years.

For hundreds of those years – maybe even thousands – they’ve been harvesting and using sea sponges. The foam piece we’re familiar with is actually a sort of skeleton, or as close to it as the soft-bodied sea sponge comes. Instead of having a hard, calcareous skeleton like people do, the flexible, squishy sea sponge animals have a fibrous framework, which can be dried and used as natural sponges.

These days, the use of natural sponge is restricted to the bathroom and sometimes the kitchen. However, in the days before man-made foams, sea sponges provided many of the functions now filled by artificial products. They were used to pad helmets for the military, filter water for towns and cities, and in painting, decorating, and pottery.

As bath sponges, they are particularly good, because the soft but hard material is great for washing and provides an exfoliating action too. There is a tactile sensation to the natural sponge that artificial methods are yet to fully replicate. That’s why we provide a range of different natural sponges, as well as many different plastic foams and foam-related products.

Memory foam is enjoying an explosion of usages at the moment. It’s being used in high-end hill and mountain hiking boots to provide better ankle support and a more comfortable walk, for example. In medicine it’s being used to decrease the chance of seriously incapacitated patients developing bedsores and long term pressure injuries. Memory foam mattresses, pillows, mattress toppers, and cushions are now common, and becoming more so every day.

It’s been around for a while, and the reason we are seeing it so much these days is that the price has come down so much. Moving from a high-tech super material developed by NASA to a commercially viable material takes some time. Memory foam manufacturing has evolved and become more efficient, and therefore cheaper. So now, the benefits are available to the makers of all kinds of memory foam products, without driving up the price of the final items too much.

The most important property of memory foam is the way it shapes to the body. Whether lining the ankle of a boot or in a mattress, the heat that any living person gives off will warm the foam and make it softer. It’ll shape itself around the body, given a little time. Imagine lying on a sandy beach in a perfectly you-shaped hollow. In the same way, a memory foam boot will shape around your ankle bone. That means your foot is less likely to move around or twist and turn inside the boot.

While memory foam is used in a diverse range of products – from office stress toys, to strength building exercise tools, to shoes and boots – the most popular usage for this excellent material is in mattresses and mattress toppers. Like anything else in life, there are pros and cons of memory foam for mattress construction.

The first and most significant of the pros is in the way memory foam shapes to an individual body. With the warmth produced by your body and the pressure of your weight, memory foam will adapt around you, which makes for a more comfortable sleep. The whole body is much better supported than with a sprung mattress topped with ordinary foam. Not only is your body shape taken into account, but the way you tend to sleep – on your side, front, or back, and the typical position of your arms – is accounted for by the foam.

However, a closed cell structure like that found in memory foam means that the material isn’t breathable like normal mattress foam, which is open cell. Air can’t flow through it, not even slowly. In the warmer months, the lack of breathability can make a mattress or mattress topper made with it seem more sweaty than a more traditionally constructed one. But that does make them warmer in winter than normal mattress too.

Memory foam mattresses can also feel quite cold when you get in, more so than a bed with a traditional mattress on it. They heat up quickly and retain that heat for longer, which is great in cooler climates but can be a disadvantage in hot places.

The type of raw plastic used by foam manufacturers for different products determines many of the properties of the final material. There are flexible and rigid foams, closed and open cell foams with different sizes of pores and air bubbles, rubber foams, foam in blocks and in sheets, tough and easily torn foams.

Polyurethane or PU foams come in two types. Both are flexible and mostly open cell (think sponges and porous materials that soak up fluids). The polyether variety can be closed cell, but in the main they aren’t. They’re typically a little less flexible and have a more regulated structure of air cells than polyester foams, which means they are more commonly found in slightly more technical products. Air filters and noise reduction devices are more likely to use polyether foams.

Polyester foams are softer and widely exploited in furniture making and packaging, although there are some technical applications for this kind of foam as well. It makes a better water filtration material than polyether foam, for example.

PVA stands for polyvinyl alcohol. This kind of foam is highly absorbent but quite durable, so a popular choice for cleaning products and bath sponges as well as medical products. PVA foams are usually machine washable too.

PVC or polyvinyl chloride foams are a highly versatile variety, because the properties of such foams can be tailored to the specific requirements of a given task. They are often used in insulation, and your mousepad may very well be made with PVC foam – but the range of possible applications for PVC foams is much, much broader.

Industrially produced artificial foams have been used for decades. From one or two early products, the foam family has evolved into myriad forms. There are now thousands of different kinds used in everything from children’s pool toys to air filters to medical sponges. While this incredibly versatile basic concept now has offshoots that suit a broad range of different purposes, some of them quite technical, one of the greatest technological advances in foam science has been the development of fire retardant forms.

Fire safety has always been a very serious issue. Even neolithic huts used quite sophisticated methods to prevent thatch roofing from catching alight, and as building methods have evolved, so has the way we look at the fire safety issue. As people settled into densely populated areas of wood-based housing, the potential for wide-scale fire damage increased. It’s only in the last few decades that we’ve been able to really come to grips with preventing the spread of fire with safe and truly fire retardant building materials – asbestos wasn’t such a good idea, in hindsight.

These days, there are firm regulations about the fire safety of various building materials. As foam manufacturers, we make and sell foams that are up to code for use in insulation, ceiling tiles, wall linings, and associated products. Bedding and household furniture foams also need to be fire retardant, and we can provide those to your specifications, too.

Of course, a lot of foam products used in the automotive industry also need to be non-burning and resistant to fire. And yes,  we sell those too.

While most people think of neoprene as a material that’s almost a fabric rather than a foam, it really does fall neatly into the foam category. Technically speaking, it’s the brand name for a particular kind of foam rubber. While many people may immediately think of wetsuits when they hear the word, neoprene and similar materials are widely used in insulation of all kinds (including wetsuits), and as a high-quality packing sheet. For instance, it’s rubber foams of this kind that line most rigid camera and laptop cases.

The reason neoprene is one of the most interesting types of foam is that it has been around a long time. In fact, it was the first commercially viable alternative to plant rubber. As such, the advent of neoprene had a very significant impact on the world economy and on manufacturing. Before the advent of mass manufacturable, multi-purpose rubbers, the plant variety was in massive demand in the tropics of South America, India and Asia. The plant rubber boom fuelled new tropical economies and established transport routes into the interior of South America, but the raw substance was difficult to collect and conditions of workers in the rubber collecting districts were notoriously bad in many countries. Neoprene meant the end of all that, good and bad.

Neoprene and other foam rubbers are still going strong. For such an old technology, they hold their own with more modern substances in terms of insulating ability, resistance to extreme heat and cold, and tolerance to oils and chemicals. Neoprene remains – and has always been – an important material.

At Technical Foam Services, we have more than 20 years experience in foam. Whatever the variety, be it open or closed cell foam, PU or rubber foam, bulk rolls or foam sheets, we know foam inside and out.

That doesn’t mean just selling it – we do so much more than that. Not only do we manufacture a huge variety of our own foam products, we also have the capability to develop the right foam for your needs. For most of our customers there will be something in the existing range that will suit the job at hand, but if not, that’s not a problem. Our specialist foam engineers have the know-how to create the perfect product to do exactly what you require, and we’ve got the manufacturing equipment and the resources to back that up.

We can cut a regular or custom foam in any way you like. Horizontal splitting, dye cutting, drilling, hot wire cutting and more advanced three dimensional shaping techniques are all within the remit at Technical Foam Services.

Finishing services are also readily available. We have the machinery and expertise to sew and weld different foams – we can mould and shape your foam for you. Our foams can come laminated or coated in PVC. We’ll happily print whatever you like on them – and can even emboss some foams.

Put simply, if it can be done with foam, we can help you do it. Our products are sold across the UK and even exported around the world.