Glass packaging concerning food products

Glass, which first saw the light of day somewhere in the Near East 4,500 years ago, is one of mankind's most astonishing and probably fortuitous creations! From its origins around 2,500 B.C. until the 16th century, glass remained an expensive commodity and was therefore reserved for noble uses, such as jewelry, amulets or even, in the case of compositions containing antimony, medicines ingested in the form of fine powders.

It was not until the beginning of our era that two major inventions appeared:

• improvement in the purity of the raw material used, silica, resulting in a transparent glass with improved appearance;

• a technological innovation, with the ability to manufacture hollow bodies using the blow-molding process.

Although glass is a relatively old packaging material, it still has a reassuring effect on consumers today, not least because of its neutrality in relation to its contents. In fact, a 2009 survey of 6,200 families conducted by the European Glass Federation showed that three-quarters of European consumers preferred glass as a packaging material for food and beverages. In recent years, with the growing awareness of the environmental impact, and more specifically the carbon footprint, of food products and their packaging, glass has come in for implicit criticism from competing packaging manufacturers...

That said, the glass industry, aware not only of its material's strengths but also its weaknesses, is implementing a whole series of measures aimed at eco-design and sustainable development. These mainly concern three aspects:

• raw materials: increasing the proportion of cullet (processed recycled glass) in the vitrifiable mix reduces CO ₂ emissions from the furnace. For example, it has been shown that the use of one tonne of cullet reduces CO ₂ emissions by around 500 kg. Clearly, this implies continuing efforts in the selective sorting of packaging in order to increase the recycling percentage, which in 2009 was only 61% with a 2012 target of 75%. In this respect, we note that glass recycling is very uneven between French regions, hence the need to develop incentives in areas with lower sorting performance... ;

• logistics: further progress can be made in reducing transport distances between recycled glass processing centers and glassworks. Optimizing the logistics involved in transporting broken glass will enable gains to be made between processing centers and glass manufacturing centers, in terms of CO ₂ emissions;...