How does glass protect people’s health?

Faced with uncertainties fuelled by global health and environmental crises, consumers are more concerned than ever about preserving their health – from what they eat to how it is packaged.

Brands, too, are paying attention to consumer concerns and are looking for new and healthy options to package their products, while staying true to their sustainability commitments.

Glass has long been a trusted and healthy material to package a wide range of products. As it forms a virtually complete barrier against external influences, glass is a health-conscious packaging choice to protect the health of people and of the planet.

Why is glass packing important for people’s health?

Packaging plays a crucial role when it comes to ensuring the safety of food and products. It goes through various stages: shipping, material handling and storage, from the factory to the stores. If products are not properly stored and inspected, product safety can be seriously compromised, putting people’s health at risk. In addition, packaging protects products from external factors, such as heat, contaminants, sunlight, physical damage and more.

As glass is a robust, natural and inert material, it’s a reliable packaging for various products, ranging from food and beverages to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. And these are not the only health benefits of glass.

How does glass packaging help protect people’s health?

Glass packaging is made of natural ingredients

Glass comes from nature, where its raw materials are abundant and sustainably sourced.

The alchemy of ingredients that make up glass – sand, soda ash, limestone and recycled content – combine to form a single-layered packaging material with no synthetic chemicals, one that can be counted on to protect people’s health.

Glass can refract solar energy

Glass can reflect solar energy, protecting sensitive products such as beer, oils, and pharmaceuticals from degradation and chemical reactions caused by sunlight.

The colour of the glass container, such as amber, green and blue, determines which types of light can penetrate the surface. These protective characteristics of glass ensure that the quality of products housed in glass remains intact.

Glass is temperature resistant and easy to sterilise

Glass packaging can withstand both cold and hot temperatures without changing its chemical composition. For pharmaceutical purposes, for example, glass can be quickly sterilised and face high temperatures without denaturing and killing bacteria and germs.

The temperature resistance of glass ensures that food, beverages and pharmaceutical products are stored, used or consumed under appropriate conditions.

Glass packaging protects products’ nutritional value

Glass helps preserve the contents’ nutritional value by acting as a natural barrier against potentially harmful bacteria.

In addition, glass is a robust material that won’t deteriorate, corrode, stain or fade – preventing the transfer of undesirable flavours from the packaging into food and beverages, and keeping their nutritional value intact.

Glass is the safest packaging material for safeguarding people’s health

Personal health and food safety are among the top consumer concerns. In fact, an InSites Study (Friends of Glass, 2017) found that health safety and quality preservation are the two main reasons why consumers choose glass. Moreover, 90% of parents are concerned about their children’s food safety, and glass, being a natural and inert material, can alleviate such worries.

Glass is also deemed safe by the relevant regulatory authorities. Due to its level of inertness, glass packaging is considered as a safe packaging by European Union authorities, making it exempt from REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemical substances) regulations, and is the only widely-used packaging material considered “generally recognised as safe” (“GRAS”) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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Glass is made from natural ingredients – making it best for preserving taste and quality. As a tasteless and odourless material with no chemical interaction, glass prevents the transfer.

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Energy efficiency and low carbon technologies in container glass

New furnaces are progressively being rebuilt or adapted with innovative low carbon technologies that are much more energy -efficient than in the past. Our industry reduces energy consumption by making use of waste heat recovery technologies, Organic Rankine Cycles technology, oxy-fuel and other symbiotic technologies, which are bringing significant energy savings. While energy savings can have a positive effect there are also downsides.

New energy management systems and technologies deployed throughout the glass plants are helping to increase energy efficiency.

Waste heat recovery from flue gases, when possible, can bring significant energy savings. They can be used in the batch and/or cullet pre-heaters, where the heat of the flue gases is used to warm the raw materials. Not all plants can install this technology as it requires a lot of space. There is also the risk of having more dust build up inside the regenerators, damaging them quicker and reducing their service life.

Another great way to reduce energy is through the Organic Rankine Cycles technology, with innovative refrigerants, that can also generate power from the heat in the flue gases. This technology has however very long pay-back times and is generally only installed in countries with high electricity prices.

Where appropriate, the use of oxy-fuel furnaces, using pure oxygen with natural gas, linked with cullet pre-heating can be economically viable, and can bring some savings as there is no need to heat the nitrogen in the air. However, the production of oxygen requires electricity and needs to be added to the furnace consumption when calculating the net impact (indirect emissions from power generation).

New technologies are also emerging like the combination of oxyfuel furnaces with methane cracking, where natural gas is injected in the regenerators to produce a syngas which can also reduce the energy consumption and the CO2 emissions.

The reduction in energy use in the container glass sector has been on a steep downward trajectory over almost 100 years and is now reaching its thermodynamic limit.

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