Inventory fading on the shelves

[Tonearm]

I just found out that some inventory that has been in the warehouse for at least 18 months has faded and must now be tossed. Is this normal in a room with blinds on the windows? There is definitely still natural light in the room but no direct light at all.

[dpd1]

With the crappy dye work done now days, yes. I have a book shelf near a slider, nothing but completely indirect light coming in. I realized that most of the stuff on the close side is totally faded after a few years. It gets progressively less faded as you get farther from the window.

[Tonearm]

Ouch. What do you think as far as a solution to this?

[dpd1]

Is it clothing? If it's folded, I guess you could use those plastic transport bins with the flip tops. Anything that is opaque will stop UV. Anything clear will not. In fact, clear storage products yellow very quickly from UV.

[g1smd]

Is it the product or the packaging that has faded?

Why has it got to be binned? Can it not be sold at reduced price, at least recovering some of your costs?

[engine]

Yes, i'm with g1smd. I guess it depends on what it is. If you can recover something from it, great, if not, consider donating it to charity or recycling to avoid landfill.

[Tonearm]

Donating it to charity is a good idea. I will do that.

It sounds like this calls for some sort of opaque UV shield. Putting everything in bins would be tricky because it would decrease accessibility and waste space. Maybe a sheet hung over each inventory shelf when not in use?

[dpd1]

As long as it's completely opaque, yes. But I would make sure it's UV doing it. There's all kinds of weird stuff that can happen when different materials are stored together. Lots of things can have bad reactions to each other, especially plastics and rubbers.

[Automan Empire]

For the museum and archival sectors, there are UV blocking window films and light fixture filters that pass the visible spectrum unaffected but have a sharp cutoff at the near UV portion of the spectrum. In other words, it is possible to have full daylight illumination without the fading UV.

Also, certain types of gas discharge bulbs emit mad quantities of UV if the fixture or outer glass envelope of the bulb is broken.