Hey, great question—and honestly, it’s one of those details nobody thinks about until they’re staring at a squashed soda bottle wedged under a bench. The short answer: on our standard park benches, the spacing between slats is 8mm (about 5/16 of an inch). On some of our urban anti-litter models, we even bring it down to 6mm. That’s tight enough to stop most trash—plastic bottles, coffee cups, fast-food wrappers, cigarette packs—from sliding through, but it’s not zero. Why not zero? Because you need to let water drain and let the wood breathe, otherwise you’d be sitting on a moldy, warped mess in six months.
The trick is hitting that sweet spot where everyday litter can’t get a foothold. A standard 500ml water bottle? The cap-down diameter is roughly 27mm, nowhere near slipping between an 8mm gap. Even sideways, the plastic crushes a bit but still won’t pass through. Cans are a non-issue. The real test is a skinny cardboard juice box—those can be around 5mm thick when empty. At 6mm spacing they’ll usually just sit on top, maybe an edge catches, but they don’t fall clean through. We’ve actually done the “trash test” during product development, dropping an assortment of typical park litter onto prototypes. Anything that goes between slats smaller than an Altoids tin gets stuck, which makes it easy for cleaning crews to spot and sweep away. Nothing ends up floating in the mud underneath.
A little deeper into design reasoning: metal benches, especially those with steel or aluminum slats, can hold tighter tolerances over time because there’s no swelling. We keep those at a crisp 7mm. Timber benches move with humidity, so we set a nominal 8mm gap that might shrink to 5mm in wet weather and expand to 10mm in a dry spell. That’s still narrower than the old-school 12mm-plus gaps you’d see on vintage park benches that were basically food-graters for litter. Now regulations and client specs often drive it too—many city RFPs ask for maximum 10mm gaps explicitly to prevent trash accumulation and reduce maintenance costs.
One more thing no one tells you: the shape of the slat edge matters almost as much as the spacing. We use a radiused top edge, not a sharp square cut, so if a small wrapper tries to slip in, it tends to catch on the curve and lie flat rather than wedging down. Combine that with a consistent 8mm gap and you’ve got a bench that performs cleanly in public plazas, bus stops, and boardwalks. So yes, the spacing is deliberately small enough to keep trash from falling through—while still letting the rain drip off like it should.