Plastic drawers need a support mechanism for their movement and in accordance to this, the better the support mechanism, the better the drawer quality is. Now, generally drawers can be pulled or pushed without runners, but that creates discomfort after prolonged use.

So a concept of runners are being used to prevent this discomfort as after longer use, these drawers tend to lose their shape. Another aspect can be the swift motion of the drawer unit in and out of the drawer chest. Generally runners are used on the sides and are responsible for holding the drawer unit inside the chest as well as allowing it to move freely. Runners can be of ball bearing type or can be of the sling type, and the selection of these is dependent on the size of the drawer.

The runners should be fixed to the drawer by starting from the bottom drawer and thus moving upwards step by step. Plastic drawer runners are relatively less rigid and thus hold on to the body. Another important aspect in case of plastic drawers is that the body tends to bend if heavy materials are placed in the drawers, thus they might need a support in the middle of the drawer. If in case it is not supported by the runner in the middle than it is better to buy a plastic drawer chest with high quality material.

The job of the runner is to support the motion while working at the back end and the plastic drawer runners are generally in sliding form as the friction is mush less as compared to other materials, thus a swift motion is guaranteed.