As global warming becomes a topic of interest for many businesses, those in the packaging industry are minimising their impact on the environment by reducing their carbon footprint.
Glass container manufacturer Owens-Illinois (O-I) is one such company that has accepted its environmental responsibilities. Not only does it have 130 years worth of experience in glass manufacturing in Australia, but O-I is also the world's largest glass packaging manufacturer, producing 100 per cent recyclable glass containers.
Dieter Lehmann, O-I communications manager for Asia-Pacific, said glass is the most sustainable form of packaging, because it is the only material that can be recycled an infinite number of times.
"It is impossible for other packaging forms to be actually 100 per cent recyclable into the same things that they always were," he told Packaging. "For example, you can have a glass bottle today, drink out of it, smash it on the ground, dust it up and give it back to us and we'll make it again to the same glass container that you had, forever."
Sustainable mandate
Lehmann said to upkeep the eternal lifecycle of glass, the company collects glass containers that have been recycled through local councils in Australia.
"Consumers know that when they are finished with their glass package they can recycle that glass package, and a lot of that comes back to us, thus continuing the recycling chain."
For instance, in Australia, 345,000 tonnes of glass containers are recycled per year, which is equivalent to removing approximately 200,000 Holden Commodores from Australia's landfill.
But to overcome those instances when there is a shortage of recycled glass due to, say, a lack of public awareness, O-I developed a method to produce its glass containers using three naturally sourced ingredients - sand, soda ash and limestone.
"All of those are naturally occurring products, and even if we have to make glass from scratch, we are not in a position where we're hurtful to the environment," Lehmann said. "But we will find the best methods to get the sand and the soda ash and the limestone as locally as possible, which also cuts down on transportation and is also emissions saving. So we get those things pretty locally from where our plants are around Australia or around the world."
But sustainable product manufacturing is not new to O-I. Since 2007, the company had set four main sustainable global targets to be reached by 2017: slashing its energy consumption by 50 per cent; reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 65 per cent; doubling cullet usage so that a global average of 60 per cent of each O-I container is recycled material; and eliminating workplace accidents.
O-I has already been able to cut up to 20 per cent of energy usage from re-building the furnaces used to melt the glass. It has also begun light-weighting its bottles by nearly 30 per cent. For example, the company has already managed to reduce the weight of a 500 g wine bottle to 350 g.
“But the trick was that we made the bottle look exactly the same. So as the customer you're getting the bottle you wanted but suddenly you're in a whole new world in environmentally friendliness because you're almost 30 per cent lighter, which means 30 per cent less glass, which means less carbon footprint," he said.
To further meet its sustainable goals, the company needed to understand its own carbon footprint and to address the calls of customers who wanted to know about their own company footprint.
“They are all looking for opportunities to be sustainable, and we believe it's our role to help them do that by giving them our glasses that they need to make the best decisions about their packaging types," Lehmann said.
This prompted O-I to conduct a life cycle assessment (LCA) across its 78 plants located in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America.
As part of its LCA, O-I measured the emissions generated by each phase in the production of glass containers. What we have done is looked at every single element of the lifecycle from the raw material extraction to transporting that raw material to our operations," he explained. "We looked at our entire production process up to transporting the finished goods out to our customer and then have the recycling element brought into it."
Tested and validated by an independent third party, AMR Research, O-I's LCA compared a typical 345 ml glass bottle to the lifecycle of aluminium and plastic Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) containers. The results showed that O-I's carbon footprint in every circumstance was less than aluminium and PET plastic, said Lehmann.
O-I's LCA also found that transporting finished glass containers comprises about 4 to 5 per cent of the complete carbon footprint of glass packaging, while every 10 per cent of recycled glass used in production cuts carbon emissions by 5 per cent and reduces energy use by 3 per cent. Lehmann said O-I will continue to look for more sustainable solutions, which may require communicating with its plants outside Australia.
"Our factories are not very different. But what I find is that different people have different goals and different ideas, and sometimes you think you've thought of everything," he said. "But then someone else at another factory says, 'we've done this and we've got this,' and suddenly you think 'we can do that.' So what we're finding is that some of our operations in New Zealand or Italy or America come up with these great ideas that we can also use. And we look at the technology around the world and we apply them. That's how we get towards our target."
O-I
www.o-i.com
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