Plastics score over metals because of their cost effectiveness, leading to increased usage in the electronic industry. However, the insulating properties of plastics create a lot of problems. To eliminate the risk of ESD due to the insulation characteristics, there are essentially 4 different approaches.

Antistatic Plastics

The first approach is to incorporate antistatic agents/additives that reduce the surface resistivity below 10^12.
These antistats can either be mixed into a polymer compound or topically coated on a sheet, tray or tube to act as a surfactant. Antistats migrate to the material surface to react with environmental humidity. This reaction creates a dissipative material surface (usually around 10E11 ). Due to the low molecular weight and migratory nature of these antistats, they are easily rubbed off the surface and have only a short window of effectiveness. The additional problems are

	These chemical antistats contain contaminants, which can damage sensitive electronic components (particularly wafers prior to die attach).
	These contaminants include chemicals (toluene, stryrene, etc), which can emit gas onto the wafer surface and ions (Cl-, Na+, SO3-, PO4-, NO3-, etc), which can corrode wafer surfaces and package leads.
	TPolymers treated with surfactants cannot typically be recycled - an issue that is gaining importance in many regions of the globe

Carbon Filled Plastics

Another approach to converting an insulating polymer into a static dissipative polymer is to fill it with conductive particles such as carbon black, carbon fibers or stainless steel fibers. This approach relies on creating a network of interconnecting particles within the polymer compound, which will allow electric charges to conduct through the insulating polymer.
The difficulty with this approach is getting consistent electrical performance from the filled polymer. Conductive fillers have very steep loading curves. This means that any slight adjustment in filler loading or in distribution of the filler within the polymer can result in an insulative pocket instead of a conductive package. When insulative pockets occur within a conductive package, tribocharging can result in trapped charges, which cannot dissipate as intended and which might discharge in an uncontrolled, unpredictable fashion. Small sized conductive fillers such as carbon black often particulate from a filled polymer onto a component lead or wafer surface while larger conductive fillers such as carbon fiber are less likely to contaminate contact surfaces in this way. An added advantage of carbon fiber fillers is that they dramatically increase the flexural modulus of the molded component. This increase in modulus results in better structural support of sensitive components

Coated Sheets

For polymer sheets or thermoformed component packages, conductive coatings containing carbon or some other conductor are sometimes utilized to provided a static discharge path on the surface. These approaches improve upon the conductive filler or antistat surfactant approaches by placing the conductive filler directly at the sheet surface. However, this approach cannot be easily used for injection molded components such as JEDEC trays or wafer carriers.
In application, coated sheet technology can produce inconsistent ESD protection. The inconsistent ESD protection of the coated sheet arises during the thermoforming process when the sheet (along with the coating) is stretched into its desired shape. Since these coatings are only a few tenths of a millimeter thick, the conductive surface will break apart as it stretches. As the coating breaks apart, islands of insulation occur in the package. These islands of insulation have no means of transporting static electricity to ground. As a result, tribocharge or field induced voltages remain trapped on the package as a "hot spot" with the potential to discharge whenever a sensitive component is brought near the package. Finally, the cleanliness (namely ionic content and off gassing) of some of these coatings is unacceptable for contact with some electronic components.

Inherently Dissipative Polymer Alloy

There are a limited number of inherently dissipative polymers (IDPs) and inherently conductive polymers (ICPs) currently in the market. It may not be feasible to use these polymers on their own as packaging materials, due to their non-robust mechanical properties. However, when these dissipative or conductive polymers are alloyed with traditional packaging polymers such as PETG or PVC, the result is a system that combines the desirable mechanical properties of the host polymer with the electrical properties of the inherently dissipative polymer.
This alloying approach provides a polymer that can be injection molded, extruded or thermoformed without deteriorating either the electrical or the mechanical properties. Moreover, these alloys can sometimes be designed to be clear instead of black. As environmental concerns begin to factor into more and more business decisions, it may come as a relief that polymer alloys can often be reground, reused or recycled. In addition, the alloy approach results in components or thermoformed trays that carry electric charges through their entire volume instead of only at the surface. This means that the chance of "hot spots" is eliminated. Finally, this alloy approach introduces no particulate contaminants to the polymer and typically contains only trace amounts of anions, cations or off gassing materials.

The following exhibit summarizes the comparative performance of all the different types of plastics materials used in the electronic industry.

Legend : L : Low; M : Moderate; H : High; Y : Yes; N : No