Italian manufacturer Bormioli Luigi has entered a partnership with ecofriendly glass, LionGlass.
LionGlass is a family of glass engineered by researchers at Penn State University in the USA and is an alternative to standard soda lime silicate glass.
Bormioli Luigi is the first company to enter an official partnership with Penn State to perform research and development with the goal of scaling up, manufacturing and ultimately commercialising LionGlass.
Elisa Biavardi, chemical laboratory manager for Bormioli Luigi, said: “This is an enormous opportunity to work with this material and create a more sustainable glass with far less carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy consumption than standard glass.
“I see it also as an opportunity to learn from one another as we explore the possibilities for this major innovation in glassmaking.”
The partnership will focus on scaling up LionGlass to create bottles for luxury beauty products like cosmetics and perfume.
By focusing on a smaller, high-end market, the company can fine tune the glass and determine the feasibility of scaling it up further for other uses, Biavardi said.
LionGlass is a new type of glass that offers the first alternative to soda lime silicate glass, which has been used for thousands of years.
LionGlass eliminates the use of carbonate batch materials and has a melting temperature roughly 400 C lower than other everyday glass products, has the potential to cut the carbon footprint of glass manufacturing in half, explained John Mauro, the Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State and co-inventor of LionGlass.
He added that LionGlass also offers improved damage resistance compared to soda lime silicate glass.
It’s roughly 10 times more crack-resistant, which could enable lightweighting of glass products, further reducing the carbon footprint of glass production by lowering the carbon emissions used to transport the glass.
Last year, Penn State filed a patent application for the composition of the first generation of LionGlass, which holds the potential to usher in a new era of sustainable glass manufacturing, Mauro said.
The university recently filed a second provisional patent application for the next generation of LionGlass with further improved properties.
Until now, LionGlass has been made in a lab setting using a crucible, a small, pot-shaped container used to melt glass at high furnace temperatures.
To produce LionGlass at an industrial scale, it will need to be melted in large batches inside massive furnaces and formed using moulds, something that has not yet been tested with the new family of glass.
The first year of the partnership will be dedicated in part to testing the feasibility of using the moulding technique with LionGlass in Bormioli’s existing manufacturing infrastructure.
Nicholas Clark, a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State and one of the inventors of LionGlass, said: “We’re translating what we're learning from the laboratory-scale, crucible melting that we're doing here at Penn State to a much larger scale of continuous glass production that's being done at Bormioli.
"It’s exciting for our work to be this close to a major industrial innovation.”
