Alkon Hippo Bins in India: The 612 Family, Crash Carts and Trolley-Mounted Storage
The Hippo range is ALKON's compact small-parts bin family, built around the 612 body and supplied in the variants 612/T, 612/S, 612/S2, 612/M, 612/DW and 612/B. It is the bin people reach for when the part is small, the pick frequency is high and the storage face is a bench, a shelf edge or the side of a trolley. Shreeram Metafusion Engineers Pvt. Ltd. has been an authorised stockist of ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. for over thirty years, and this page sets out what the family covers, the one Hippo dimension we are willing to print exactly, how the double-wide changes a rail layout, and how these bins behave on hospital crash carts and workshop trolleys. It is written for the person who has to raise the purchase order and then defend the choice six months later.
Where the Hippo 612 family sits inside the ALKON range
ALKON Plastics Pvt. Ltd. describes itself as the manufacturer of the largest range of material handling bins in India, and the catalogue we hold at Vashi runs to 476-plus products across nine ranges. Within that spread the Hippo family is the compact small-parts group built around the 612 body. It was never intended as a bulk container, and it should not be bought as one; the Mammoth bin at 820 x 315 x 300 mm outside covers that end of the catalogue. Hippo belongs at the point of use, on the bench front, the shelf face or the side of a trolley, where a hand goes in every few minutes and the bin has to sit close to the work.
The reason buyers keep coming back to the 612 body is density. A narrow front means more part numbers per running metre of rail or shelf, which matters more than raw volume once you are storing terminals, circlips, grub screws, O-rings, catheter caps or small electronic components. Most stores that go wrong do so because somebody chose a bin twice the size that was needed, filled it a quarter of the way, and then ran out of shelf face for the next thirty items. The Hippo family exists to keep the storage face busy rather than the bin bottom.
There are jobs the family will not do, and it is better to say so on the way in. Dense castings, cut billets and anything where the load is concentrated in a small footprint belong in the deeper, heavier Bull range. Long thin parts fed from a rack aisle are better in a Panda shelf bin, where the 301 body is 315 mm long outside and the picking is done from the shelf depth rather than the shelf face. Kits and trays that travel between stations belong in a Tote, where the AK-421 is 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside. Hippo is for the small, frequent, hand-picked item.
When you raise an enquiry, quote the family and the variant together. "Hippo bin 612" on its own is a family reference, not an orderable code, and the suffix is what fixes the body you actually receive. The full listing sits under our material handling section at /products/fpo-material-handling-bins-and-accessories, and the wider catalogue index is at /products. If you are comparing families before you commit, the numbers that matter are collected on the comparison write-up and on the individual range pages linked further down this page.
Reading the family: 612/T, S, S2, M, DW and B
The Hippo family is written as 612 followed by a suffix: T, S, S2, M, DW and B. The suffix is not a separate product line and it is not a colour or a pack code. It identifies the body you are buying, and two bins from the same family can look almost identical in a photograph while differing by enough millimetres to change how many fit on your rail. This is the single most common cause of a rejected consignment in this category — somebody types "Hippo 612" on a purchase order, the buyer at the other end picks the most commonly moving variant, and the bins arrive correct against the PO and wrong against the shelf.
DW is the double-wide. It occupies the width of two standard positions in one moulding, giving a single wide aperture instead of a pair of narrow ones. That is a layout decision as much as a storage decision, and it is treated separately later on this page because it changes how you count positions on a rail. The remaining suffixes step through the body variants in the family, and the honest position is that we publish the current dimension table rather than reciting figures from memory on a web page. Ask us for the sheet, or take it from /downloads, and put the numbers on the proforma before you release the order.
Our standing advice to stores and purchase teams across Maharashtra and Gujarat is to treat the printed dimension as the contract and the name as a label. If the proforma invoice says 612/S2 and carries the outside and inside dimensions in millimetres, an incoming inspector can measure a sample and clear the lot in two minutes. If it says only "Hippo bins, small", the inspection becomes an argument. This costs nothing to get right at enquiry stage and is expensive to correct after a full container of bins has been distributed to four plants.
Before you release a Hippo order, work through the checklist below against your own layout drawing rather than against the catalogue photograph. Every line on it exists because we have seen an order go wrong on exactly that point, and none of them takes more than a minute to confirm at enquiry stage. The pattern is always the same: the bins themselves are correct, but something about the mounting, the quantity or the variant was assumed rather than stated, and the correction has to happen after the material has already been split between plants.
- The complete code including the suffix — 612/T, 612/S, 612/S2, 612/M, 612/DW or 612/B
- Outside and inside dimensions in millimetres, printed on the quotation and the proforma
- The mounting method: shelf, louvre panel, wall rail, universal rail, stand or trolley
- Bins per level and levels per bay, so the total quantity is derived from a drawing and not a guess
- Colour requirement and whether you need a label holder or a printed label field
- Whether the area demands a conductive or ESD-safe item, which is a separate range decision
The one Hippo dimension we will always print: 100 x 110 x 53 mm
The Hippo 612/T measures 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside and 80 x 90 x 43 mm inside. Those two sets of figures are worth more than any amount of descriptive copy, because everything you need to plan a shelf comes out of them. The outside dimensions tell you how much rail or shelf face each bin consumes. The inside dimensions tell you what will actually go in. Confirm which face is the open front for your orientation before you finalise a bay drawing, because the same bin planned front-on and side-on gives two different bins-per-metre answers and the drawing is what your fitter will follow.
Compare the two sets and you can see where the material goes. The 612/T loses about 20 mm across each horizontal axis and about 10 mm in height between outside and inside — that is wall thickness, draft and the front lip that lets you pick without lifting the bin. Multiply the internal figures and the usable cavity is roughly 80 x 90 x 43 mm, which is about 0.31 litre. Nobody fills a pick bin to the brim, so plan on 0.24 to 0.25 litre of working volume per 612/T. That number, not the outside size, is what decides whether your replenishment interval is realistic.
A worked example makes it concrete. Take a small fastener you already stock. Weigh a hundred pieces on the stores balance and divide to get the piece weight. Loose fasteners tipped into a bin pack with a great deal of air between them, so assume that only about half the internal cavity carries metal. Convert the 0.24 litre of working volume accordingly, and you have a defensible pieces-per-bin figure to check against consumption. Doing this for the ten fastest-moving items in a stores takes under an hour and will usually change at least two of your bin choices before any money is spent.
The other half of the arithmetic is the shelf. If the 100 mm face is the front, a clear 900 mm shelf takes nine 612/T bins in a row with nothing to spare, and eight if you want finger clearance and a label gap. The same 900 mm takes seven Supra SB 1 bins at 125 mm across the front, and eight Rhino ARTB-05 bins at 109 mm. That difference of one or two positions per shelf, multiplied across a forty-bay stores in a Pune or Chennai plant, is the difference between fitting your whole fastener list on one wall and spilling it onto a second.
Polypropylene copolymer, resin code 05 and the -10 C to +70 C window
All the bin ranges we stock, Hippo included, are moulded in polypropylene copolymer and carry resin code 05 along with food-safe and recyclable marks. The stated service range is -10 C to +70 C. Those are not decorative specifications; they are the boundaries within which the bin behaves as designed, and almost every premature failure we are asked about turns out to be a bin that spent part of its life outside them. Copolymer grades are chosen for this kind of duty because they take knocks better at the lower end of the range than a stiffer homopolymer would, which is exactly what a bin dropped on a concrete floor needs.
The +70 C ceiling has direct consequences for anyone planning to clean or sterilise the bins. Steam sterilisation runs far above it, so Hippo bins are not autoclave items and should not be sent into a CSSD cycle. Many industrial cabinet washers and utensil washers also run hotter than 70 C, so check the actual cycle temperature with your equipment supplier rather than assuming a wash programme is safe. Warm water and a mild detergent, wiped or brushed and air dried, is the routine that keeps the bins in service. Anything hotter is a decision to shorten their life.
The lower limit matters less often but it does matter. A pharmaceutical cold room in Ahmedabad or Hyderabad running at 2 to 8 C is comfortably inside the range. A deep freeze store at -20 C is not, and bins taken in and out of one will become brittle and crack at the lip long before their normal life is up. Ambient heat is the more common Indian problem: a bin on a rack under an uninsulated metal roof in Rajkot in May, or a bin parked a metre from an induction heater or a welding bay, can easily sit above the ceiling for hours a day even though the shop floor reads comfortable.
The food-safe and recyclable marks are useful in two settings. Canteen stores, packing halls and pharmaceutical secondary packing areas often need a documented material position for anything that touches product or sits inside a controlled area, and the marks give the QA team something concrete to file. At the other end of the life cycle, resin code 05 means broken bins go into your PP recycling stream rather than into mixed plastic waste. If your plant reports on waste segregation, tell the housekeeping contractor the code once and it stops being a monthly argument.
A sizing method that survives an audit
Sizing a bin by eye is the reason so many stores contain the wrong ones. The method that holds up is to measure three things in order: the part, the shelf, and the replenishment interval. Start with the part in its worst orientation, not its neatest one. A spring clip lies flat in the drawing and stands up in the bin. Take the longest dimension the part can present, add eight to ten millimetres so a gloved hand can get in and out without scraping, and you have the minimum internal dimension the bin has to offer. For the 612/T that internal figure is 80 x 90 x 43 mm.
The shelf is the second constraint and it usually wins. Measure the clear width between uprights, not the nominal bay size, and measure the vertical clearance between shelves at the position you actually intend to use. Then divide the clear width by the outside front dimension of the bin. If the answer is not close to a whole number you are buying air, and it is worth checking whether a neighbouring family divides more cleanly into your existing racking. Plants that inherited racking from an earlier layout in Nashik or Coimbatore often find that changing bin family beats changing steel.
The third constraint is time. A pick bin should hold at least one full replenishment cycle plus a margin, otherwise the storekeeper spends the day topping up. Take the daily consumption, multiply by the number of days between replenishments, add about thirty percent, and compare that against the pieces-per-bin figure derived from the internal volume. If the bin cannot hold a cycle, either move to a larger member of the family, use a double-wide, or move that item to a two-bin arrangement. Work through this sequence for every line and the resulting bill of material is one you can defend line by line.
- Measure the part in its worst resting orientation, not its drawing orientation
- Add 8-10 mm clearance so a gloved hand can pick cleanly
- Check the internal, not external, dimension against that figure
- Derive pieces per bin from internal volume, allowing roughly half the cavity as air for loose parts
- Multiply daily consumption by the replenishment interval and add about 30 percent
- Divide clear shelf width by the bin's front dimension and round down, never up
Crash cart bins: putting the 612 body on a trolley
Crash carts, trolleys, rails and universal rails are all listed accessories alongside the bins, and the combination of a cart with rail-mounted bins is one of the most common ways Alkon Hippo Bins in India actually get used. The principle is simple: the cart provides the mobility and the working height, the rails provide a mounting face on the cart's sides or ends, and the bins clip onto the rails so that the contents travel with the cart instead of sliding around inside a drawer. The result is a mobile storage face rather than a mobile box, and it changes how quickly an operator or a nurse can find something under pressure.
The 612 body suits cart work for three reasons. It is short in height, so a cart face can carry several rails one above the other without the top row going above eye level. It is light, so a fully populated cart still rolls on a warehouse floor or a hospital corridor with one hand. And its narrow front keeps the bins inside the cart footprint, which matters because a bin that projects beyond the cart's width will be knocked off by the first door frame it meets. When people report bins falling off carts, the cause is almost always overhang or a bin clipped to the wrong rail profile.
In a manufacturing setting, crash cart bins earn their keep on kitting and changeover. A cart is prepared with the exact bins required for one variant, wheeled to the station, and taken back when the batch ends. Nothing is decanted, nothing is counted twice, and the bins themselves are the traceable unit. Assembly plants around Pune, Chennai and Bengaluru run this arrangement for wiring accessories and fasteners, and maintenance teams use the same idea for a planned shutdown, where a cart is loaded from the stores against a job card the night before.
There are a few rules worth writing into the cart layout drawing. Keep the heaviest bins on the lowest rail so the centre of gravity stays down and the cart does not tip on a ramp or a lift threshold. Do not populate a rail beyond the width of the cart deck. Leave one rail deliberately empty as working space, because a cart with no free surface leads to parts being placed on the floor. Finally, number the rails and the positions on the drawing so that a cart returning from a job can be checked back to a known state instead of a remembered one.
Hospital, ward store and clinical trolley use
Hospitals use the same hardware for a different reason. On an emergency trolley the requirement is that a specific item is found in a specific place by somebody who is not thinking about storage at the time. Rail-mounted bins on the trolley sides give each consumable its own visible, labelled position, and the shallow 612 body means a full row can be scanned at a glance rather than rummaged through. Because the bins lift off the rail individually, a used bin can be replaced with a pre-packed one at restocking instead of the whole trolley being taken out of service.
The cleaning limits from the material section apply directly here and should be settled before the first order. The bins are not autoclavable, since steam cycles run far above the +70 C service ceiling, and they should not be treated as sterile-service items. For surface disinfection, confirm the compatibility of your specific disinfectant with polypropylene with your own supplier — chlorine-releasing solutions, alcohols and quaternary compounds all behave differently, and the sensible practice is to trial one bin for a few weeks before committing a whole hospital. Any bin showing crazing or chalking on the front lip should come out of service.
Beyond the emergency trolley, the same bins do quieter work in nursing station shelves, ward stores, dressing rooms and biomedical workshops. A Panda shelving unit fitted with Hippo bins gives a nursing store a legible face where minimum and maximum levels can be marked directly at each position. Hospitals in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Hyderabad that run several wards to a common list benefit most from standardising on one or two Hippo codes across the whole building, because a bin from one ward then fits a rail in another and stock can be moved without carpentry. If your biomedical workshop handles boards and modules, ask separately about the ESD-safe range at /products/esd-safe-products rather than assuming a standard bin will do.
Workshop benches, line-side feeding and the tool crib
On a workshop bench, the useful pattern is a louvre panel fixed at the back of the bench with Hippo bins clipped across it at two or three heights. The bins hold consumables — inserts, tips, washers, cable ties, cutting fluid nozzles — and the bench top stays clear because nothing needs to be parked on it. The louvre panel is the item people forget to order, and a set of bins with no mounting face ends up stacked in a corner within a month. Panels, rails, universal rails, stands, partitions and trolleys are all in the accessories list, and they should be quoted on the same enquiry as the bins.
Line-side feeding is the other heavy user. A two-bin arrangement works naturally with a family like Hippo: two identical bins per part number, the front one in use and the rear one full, with the empty going back to the store as the signal to replenish. This only works if both bins are genuinely identical, which brings us back to ordering by full code. A line running 612/S in one bay and 612/S2 in the next because two purchase orders were raised loosely will break the discipline that the system depends on, and the operator will be the one blamed for it.
Maintenance stores and tool cribs are the least glamorous and often the most valuable application. Spares for pumps and motors in a Coimbatore unit, bearing seals and circlips in a Rajkot engineering shop, contactor spares and terminal blocks in a Nashik panel shop — these are exactly the items that sit in unlabelled cardboard trays until somebody needs one at two in the morning. Moving them into a labelled Hippo face on a wall or a mobile cart converts an hour of searching into a thirty-second pick. Label the position rather than the bin itself, so that a broken bin can be replaced without the identity of the location moving with it.
The double-wide: when 612/DW beats two standard bins
The 612/DW gives one wide aperture in place of two standard positions. That is worth having when the part itself is wider than a single Hippo mouth, when the pick is a two-handed one, or when an item is stored as a set rather than as loose pieces — a valve kit, a gasket set, a small sub-assembly with its fasteners. It is also useful where an operator must reach in with a gloved hand and a tool at the same time, because the extra width removes the knuckle-scraping that makes people leave bins half open on the bench.
The cost of a double-wide is layout density, and it should be counted rather than felt. Every DW you place removes a part-number position from that rail. In a stores that is already tight on shelf face, ten double-wides across a wall means ten fewer items on the wall. Plan the rail in units of standard 612 widths, treat each DW as occupying two of those units, and total the positions before ordering. If the count does not close, the answer is usually to move the few genuinely wide items to a DW and leave the rest standard, not to make the whole wall wide.
There is also a mixing rule worth following. Keep double-wides grouped, typically along one or two rails, instead of scattering them through an otherwise uniform face. A uniform face is easy to count, easy to photograph for a layout standard and easy to restock; a face where widths alternate randomly is hard to audit and tempting to rearrange. If you are building a standard bay drawing that will be replicated across several plants in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu, decide the DW positions once at drawing stage and hold them, so a bin transferred between sites always lands on a matching rail.
Executive and modular combinations: bins plus stands, panels and rails
Hippo bins are rarely bought alone. The accessories that turn them into a working system are partitions, louvre panels, stands, trolleys, rails, the universal rail and crash carts, and the combination units in the catalogue are simply pre-thought arrangements of those parts. A free-standing panel on a base gives a double-sided storage face that can be wheeled or bolted down. A bench-height stand with two or three rails gives an operator a personal store within arm's reach. A wall of universal rail lets you change the bin mix later without drilling again, which is the single biggest reason to specify rail rather than fixing bins directly.
When people ask for an executive modular combination they usually mean a compact, tidy unit for a supervisor's desk, a quality room, a dispensary or a service counter — somewhere that has to look presentable as well as work. The way to specify one is to fix the frame first, decide how many rails it will carry, then choose the bin mix per rail, keeping the widths consistent so the front line stays straight. Ask us for the current combination list rather than assembling one from a photograph, because the frames and rails are matched to particular bin profiles and a mismatch is only discovered at installation.
Partitions deserve a specific note. A partition inside a larger bin is a good answer when two related items are always picked together and both are low-volume; it is a poor answer when one of the two moves ten times faster, because the fast item will overflow into the slow one's half within a week. In that case a smaller separate bin is the correct choice, and the Hippo family exists precisely to make that separation cheap. Related systems worth looking at while you plan are the shelving at /products/panda-shelving-systems-and-accessories, the tilt bins at /products/roo-tilt-bins, the component organisers at /products/components-organisers and the complete frames at /products/storage-systems.
Hippo, Supra, Bull, Rhino and Koala: choosing between small-part bins
The confirmed outside dimensions make the comparison concrete. Hippo 612/T is 100 x 110 x 53 mm. Rhino ARTB-05 is 109 x 104 x 49 mm. Supra SB 1 is 125 x 100 x 60 mm. Koala AKP-01 is 130 x 105 x 60 mm. Bull Bin 5 is 168 x 102 x 74 mm. Four of those five occupy a broadly similar patch of shelf, which is exactly why buyers get stuck; the differences that matter are the front geometry, how the bin mounts, and how far the family's size ladder runs above the entry member. Full detail on each sits on the pages for the Supra range, the Bull range and the Rhino Tuff ARTB series.
Ladder depth is often the deciding factor. Supra runs from SB 1 to SB 8 with an SB 7X, and Bull runs from Bull 5 up to Bull 55, so if a single wall has to hold everything from a grub screw to a gearbox seal in one visual language, those families stretch further. Hippo is the tighter, more specialised family for the small end, and it is at its best where the majority of the stock is genuinely small and the constraint is positions per metre. Mixing families across one bay is not wrong, but mixing them within one rail rarely looks or works well.
Treat the rules below as a first cut and then verify the choice against measured internal volume rather than against a catalogue picture, because photographs flatten the differences that actually decide the job. Where two families both clear the test, prefer the one you already hold in stores, since a common spare bin is worth more than a marginally better fit. A structured side-by-side of all four families is set out in the comparison article, and the full stock position across every range we carry is on the manufacturer and stockist page.
One more consideration applies once the fleet gets large. Every additional family you introduce is another code in the item master, another rail profile to hold as a spare and another thing for a new storekeeper to learn. Sites that run cleanly for years are usually the ones that settled on two families — one small and one large — and resisted adding a third for a handful of awkward items. Where a genuine outlier exists, deal with it as an outlier rather than letting it set the standard for the whole stores.
- Very small parts, maximum part numbers per metre of shelf face, frequent hand picking — Hippo or Rhino Tuff
- One wall covering a very wide size spread in one style — Supra or Bull
- Dense, heavy or sharp-edged parts needing a deeper, tougher body — Bull
- Picking from rack depth rather than shelf face — Panda Shelf Bins, where the 301 is 315 mm long outside
- Kits or work-in-progress that travel between stations — Tote bins, AK-421 at 400 x 255 x 100 mm outside
- Static-sensitive electronic assemblies — the ESD and conductive range, decided separately from the bin family
How small bins actually fail, and how to avoid it
The first failure mode is misuse against the part class. A Hippo bin filled with dense metal offcuts is carrying a load the body was not designed around, and the damage shows first as a split at the mounting lug or a bowed base that will no longer sit flat. This is not a manufacturing problem; it is a specification problem, and it is fixed by moving that item to a deeper, heavier body such as the Bull range and leaving the Hippo for what it is good at. If you find a bin cracked in service, record what was in it before you order a replacement, otherwise the same bin will fail again.
The second is heat, and it is the one people never log. A bin parked near a welding bay, an oven mouth, a press with hot tooling, or on a rack directly under an uninsulated shed roof will exceed the +70 C service ceiling for hours at a time. Polypropylene does not fail dramatically at that point; it slowly loses stiffness, distorts at the lip and stops holding the rail correctly. If bins in one specific location keep going soft or loose while identical bins elsewhere are fine, measure the air temperature at that location before blaming the bins.
The third is chemical exposure, usually from cleaning. Wiping a greasy bin with thinner or a strong solvent because it was the nearest bottle on the bench is common and rarely recorded. So is storing an open container of solvent inside a bin. Both leave a bin that looks fine and cracks a month later. Set one approved cleaning method — warm water below 70 C and mild detergent — write it on the housekeeping card, and keep solvents in the container they came in. The fourth failure is mounting: bins on the wrong rail profile, unsecured bins on a moving cart, and labels stuck to the bin instead of to the position, so identity walks away with the first broken body.
Procurement, all-India supply, and a maintenance checklist
Raising a clean enquiry saves a week. Send the full codes with suffixes, the quantity per code, the accessories you need alongside them — panels, rails, universal rail, stands, trolleys, crash carts, partitions — and, where you have one, the bay or cart layout drawing. We will come back with dimensions printed against each line so your incoming inspection has something to measure against. Our counter is at Shop-1, Gagangiri Chs, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra 400703, open Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 19:00, on 93266 29967 or 98201 01937, and at enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com. The enquiry form is at /contact and datasheets are at /downloads.
Being based in Vashi puts us in the middle of the Navi Mumbai and JNPT corridor, which is convenient for despatch outward as well as for customers who want to see a sample across the counter before committing. We supply Alkon Hippo Bins in India well beyond Mumbai — engineering and auto units around Pune and Nashik, chemical and pharmaceutical plants in Gujarat around Ahmedabad and Rajkot, electronics and aerospace suppliers in Bengaluru, auto and general engineering in Chennai and Coimbatore, formulations and equipment makers around Hyderabad, and appliance, electrical and trading customers in Delhi NCR and Kolkata. Application notes by sector are collected at /industries, and background on the firm is at /about.
For anything that will be repeated across sites, order a sample set first. Fit it to one real bay or one real cart, run it for a fortnight, and only then convert the layout into a standard. Once it is standard, put the exact codes into your item master with the dimensions in the description field, so that a reorder two years later by a different buyer produces the same bin. Standardisation is the whole return on this category: bins that interchange between wards, benches, carts and plants are worth considerably more than bins that were individually optimal and are now individually unique.
Finally, keep the installed base honest with a short recurring check rather than one large annual exercise that nobody has time to finish. Ten minutes per stores area per quarter is enough to catch the three things that actually degrade a bin system — cracked bodies, unreadable labels and loose fixings — while they are still cheap to correct. Write the check into the same routine that covers your racking inspection, so it is done by somebody who is already walking the aisle rather than by a separate visit that gets postponed.
- Quarterly: inspect the front lip and mounting lugs of a sample of bins for cracks or distortion
- Confirm every position still carries a readable label, and that the label is on the rail, not on the bin
- Check rail, panel and stand fixings, especially on trolleys and crash carts that take knocks
- Identify any location that has become a heat source and move the bins away from it
- Recount bins per bay and per cart against the layout drawing after every shutdown
- Send end-of-life bins to the PP stream under resin code 05 instead of mixed plastic waste
- Re-order against the stored code, with dimensions on the purchase order, not against a photograph
Frequently asked questions
What sizes are available in the Alkon Hippo 612 range?
The family is supplied as 612/T, 612/S, 612/S2, 612/M, 612/DW and 612/B. The suffix identifies the body, and DW is the double-wide that occupies two standard positions in a single moulding. The dimension we publish with confidence is the 612/T at 100 x 110 x 53 mm outside and 80 x 90 x 43 mm inside. For the remaining variants we would rather send you the current dimension sheet than quote hippo bin sizes from memory on a web page, so ask us for it or take it from the downloads section, and get the figures printed on the proforma before you release the order.
What is the exact size of a Hippo bin 612/T?
The Hippo bin 612 in the T variant measures 100 x 110 x 53 mm on the outside and 80 x 90 x 43 mm on the inside. The gap between the two is wall thickness, moulding draft and the front lip that lets you pick without lifting the bin. Multiplying the internal figures gives roughly 0.31 litre of cavity, of which about 0.24 to 0.25 litre is realistic working volume once you stop filling to the brim. Confirm which face you intend as the open front before finalising a bay drawing, because that decides how many bins fit across your shelf.
Can Hippo bins be used on a hospital crash cart?
Yes, and that is one of the standard applications. Crash carts, trolleys, rails and universal rails are listed accessories, so the bins clip onto rails fitted to the cart's sides or ends and each consumable gets a fixed, visible, labelled position. The shallow 612 body lets several rails sit one above the other without the top row going above eye level. Two practical rules: keep the heaviest bins on the lowest rail so the cart does not become top-heavy, and make sure no bin projects beyond the cart footprint, because overhanging crash cart bins are the ones that get knocked off in doorways.
Can Hippo bins be autoclaved or run through a hot dishwasher?
No. The stated service range is -10 C to +70 C, and steam sterilisation runs far above that, so these bins must not go into an autoclave or a CSSD cycle. Many industrial cabinet and utensil washers also run hotter than 70 C, so check the actual cycle temperature with your equipment supplier before putting bins through one. The routine that keeps them in service is warm water below 70 C with a mild detergent, wiped or brushed and air dried. For clinical surface disinfection, confirm compatibility of your particular disinfectant with polypropylene and trial one bin before committing a whole department.
When should I choose the 612/DW double-wide instead of two standard bins?
Choose the double-wide when the item itself is wider than a single Hippo mouth, when the pick is genuinely two-handed, or when you are storing a set rather than loose pieces, such as a valve kit or a small sub-assembly with its fasteners. The cost is layout density: every DW removes one part-number position from that rail. Plan the rail in units of standard 612 widths, count each DW as two units, and total the positions before ordering. Keep double-wides grouped on one or two rails rather than scattered, so the face stays easy to count and to restock.
Are Hippo bins available in an ESD or conductive version?
ESD and conductive safe products are a separate range in the ALKON catalogue rather than a variant of every bin family, so do not assume a standard Hippo will serve a static-controlled area. If you are storing boards, modules, sensors or anything else that has to sit inside an EPA, tell us the requirement at enquiry stage and we will confirm which items are currently offered in a conductive version and in what sizes. Buying a standard bin for an EPA and discovering the problem at audit is expensive; the ESD range page on the site is the right starting point for that conversation.
How do Hippo bins compare with Supra, Bull and Rhino Tuff bins?
On footprint they are closer than people expect: Hippo 612/T is 100 x 110 x 53 mm, Rhino ARTB-05 is 109 x 104 x 49 mm, Supra SB 1 is 125 x 100 x 60 mm and Bull Bin 5 is 168 x 102 x 74 mm. What separates them is ladder depth and body strength. Supra runs SB 1 to SB 8 plus SB 7X and Bull runs from 5 to 55, so those families stretch further up the size range on a single wall. Hippo is the tighter small-parts family, best where the constraint is part numbers per metre of shelf face rather than volume per bin.
Do you supply Alkon Hippo Bins outside Mumbai?
Yes. We are an authorised ALKON stockist based at Sector 17, Vashi in Navi Mumbai, and we despatch across India — engineering and auto units in Pune and Nashik, chemical and pharmaceutical plants around Ahmedabad and Rajkot in Gujarat, electronics and precision work in Bengaluru, auto and general engineering in Chennai and Coimbatore, formulations in Hyderabad, and trading and appliance customers in Delhi NCR and Kolkata. Send the full codes, quantities and accessories on one enquiry to enquiry@shreeram-metafusion.com, or call 93266 29967 or 98201 01937 between 10:00 and 19:00, Monday to Saturday.
What accessories do I need to mount Hippo bins on a wall, bench or trolley?
The bins need a mounting face, and that is the item most often left off the purchase order. For a bench, a louvre panel fixed behind the work surface. For a wall, rail or universal rail, which has the advantage that the bin mix can be changed later without drilling again. For mobile use, a trolley or crash cart with rails on the working faces. Stands give a free-standing double-sided face where no wall is available, and partitions divide a larger bin internally. Quote all of these on the same enquiry as the bins so the profiles are matched from the start.
Are Hippo bins food safe and recyclable?
The bin ranges are moulded in polypropylene copolymer carrying resin code 05, with food-safe and recyclable marks. That is useful in two places. In canteen stores, packing halls and pharmaceutical secondary packing areas, the marks give your QA team a documented material position for items sitting inside a controlled area. At end of life, resin code 05 means broken bins belong in the PP recycling stream rather than in mixed plastic waste, which matters if your plant reports on waste segregation. Tell your housekeeping contractor the code once and it stops being a recurring argument.
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