Why there's a revolution on the way in glass making

I'm handed an elegant pear-shaped bottle with an intricate leaf pattern reaching up around the neck.

Despite being empty, it's heavy.

I ask how much the bottle costs. "About £270," I'm told. I hand the bottle back - very carefully.

The bottle, designed for a rare whisky, is one of the creations of Stoelzle Flaconnage, based in Knottingley, West Yorkshire. Glassware has been made on this site since 1871.

In 1994 the factory was taken over by Austria's Stoelzle Glass Group, which has focused the plant on making bottles for the spirits industry.

It can handle the design, bottle making and decoration all on one site.


Demand is strong, helped by the boom in gin making and demand for whisky in Asia. When I visit, the plant is busy, lumps of molten glass are dropping into dozens of moulds, the glass still glowing orange from the heat of the furnace.

To stand out in a crowded market, customers want distinctive bottles, with patterned and sometimes coloured glass, elaborate labels and artwork.

"What our clients are looking for is to have their product presented in an outstanding - sometimes iconic - way," says Thomas Riss, chief executive of Stoelzle Flaconnage.

While business is brisk, Stoelzle Flaconnage - and other glassmakers - are having to make some big decisions about the way they make glass containers.

The European Union is cracking down on packaging waste. It wants packaging to be lighter so less material is needed and less fuel is needed for transportation.

It has been working on the Packaging & Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which is in the final stages of approval.

Under the rules, member states would have to cut back on packaging weight and would have to introduce measures to meet targets.

There is concern in the glass container industry that it will be unfairly targeted as glass is relatively heavy, compared with plastic or aluminium.

"Light doesn't mean sustainable," points out Vanessa Chesnot, from FEVE, the industry body which represents European glass container makers.

"Glass is 100% and infinitely recyclable... so, you can recycle a whisky bottle into another bottle, forever basically."

While it's true that glass recycling is an established process, making glass, even using recycled materials, is energy intensive.

Most glass making involves burning natural gas to heat the raw materials in a furnace to 1,500C. Burning gas and heating the raw materials both produce CO2.

The furnace I saw in action at Stoelzle Flaconnage uses about 191,000 kWh of energy per day - that's enough to supply the average UK household with energy for 12 years.

It is considered a relatively small furnace; bigger plants would have furnaces twice the size.

What's more, glass furnaces are never turned off, as it takes 12 days for a furnace to reach its operating temperature. Essentially a furnace will run all day, every day for its operational life - typically between ten and 12 years.

So the glass industry is looking at switching from gas-fired furnaces to electricity.

If the electricity comes from a sustainable source then the carbon footprint is slashed, which could go a long way to helping glass firms meet their goal to become net zero by 2050.