Decarbonising the European Glass Industry: Real Paths to Net-Zero

Attending the webinar on Decarbonising the European Glass Industry provided me an opportunity to connect with researchers working hard to make glass production more sustainable.

Glass is one of the most important materials that enables several critical technologies powering the world. Fiber optic cables,displays, scientific equipment,lenses and of course windows. Every year nearly 150 million tonnes of glass is made. Therefore it is essential that we find ways to produce glass in a more eco-friendly way.

The European Innovation council has been leading the effort in this space by funding research projects like H2 glass, Everglass and GIFFT in collaboration with industrial partners like Schott,PlasmaAir and several universities throughout the region.

One strategy is to reuse and recycle existing glass. Here innovations like localised melting with lasers are making the process cheaper as compared to full melt processing but concerns about gathering waste glass remains. It's not easy to get feedstock to drive a recycling plant.

The other approach is to use sustainable fuels to decarbonise the energy required to manufacture glass. Despite the reputation glass may have, the embodied energy required for its manufacture is slightly less than steel. Yet its dependence on LNG is problematic. The speakers suggested use of hydrogen as a substitute which works but it comes with the additional complexity of handling electrolysers and pipes.

Hydrogen has its place but for this particular problem, a far better option, I think, is to use plasma torches which not only have better electrical-heat conversion efficiency (easily attaining temperatures as high as 5000K at 70% efficiency) but are also much simpler to set up and control.

For packaging , glass bottles beat PET if they are refilled and reused. But what could enable even more savings are glass + natural fiber composites where glass lining could seal off pores in natural fibers providing a longer lasting lightweight container. It doesn't have to be either all glass or all plastic. New possibilities are emerging and these materials systems will be essential to realise a truly sustainable product.

While the discussion centered around glass, if techniques could be developed to purify common hematite coated sand it would have a massive impact on the entire industry by reducing dependence on pure quartz or on heavy chemicals treatments. That would be revolutionary.

Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Strategy Consultant--Innovation/ Materials science/International relations/Telecommunications/Digital Transformation/Partnerships

Mobile/whatsapp:+919654119771

email:getellobed@gmail.com

Comments

Why does collapsing a bubble with a sound wave produce light?

My thoughts on a reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/1lwxxc3/comment/n2jx8gp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button The collapsing of a bubble with sound wave leads to the emission of light in a phenomenon known as sonoluminescnce. The bubble collapse is rapid and the gas inside the core doesn't have time to exchange heat with the surroundings as it's compressed rapidly leading to what is known as adiabatic compression. This compression heats up the gas to very high temp. The exact temperatures are inferred from the spectrum of emission which is thought to be a blackbody. But some sophisticated models have also been developed that put the temp in the range 5000k-20000k some even higher. There's also debate on whether the bubble emission spectrum is truly a blackbody or is it line emission or bremsstrahlung? Personally I think its a mix of all three. The pressures create...

WeWork India Sustainability Summit 2025 Tackling Technical Challenges in Green Building Innovation

I thank we work India for organising sustainability summit 2025 to help drive real change towards decarbonising the commercial real estate sector. I gained valuable insights from the esteemed speakers especially around policy and regulation in this space. My own thoughts kept pulling me towards some of the more technical challenges which are quite significant. The current strategy of making buildings sustainable focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of a building during its operation and construction. In the operational stage the challenge is to ensure that the building can run on green energy. Heating and cooling are the heaviest users of energy and thus obvious targets for decarbonisation. Since buildings these days scale vertically it's impossible to cover the energy requirements from rooftop solar panels. Unless solar panels can be installed vertically along the facade, the surface area would be too limited to generate any significant power. The idea has been tr...

Can you compress water and turn it solid?

A question asked on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n02vlg/ Yes and this has been experimentally confirmed. Shock compression of water has produced different forms of ice crystals. SOME REFERENCES Experimental evidence for superionic water ice using shock compression https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-017-0017-4 This particular form of ice melted at 5000K at 200Gpa. https://www.llnl.gov/article/44081/first-experimental-evidence-superionic-ice An interesting tidbit from the research is in this paragraph >Using diamond anvil cells (DAC), the team applied 2.5 GPa of pressure (25 thousand atmospheres) to pre-compress water into the room-temperature ice VII, a cubic crystalline form that is different from "ice-cube" hexagonal ice, in addition to being 60 percent denser than water at ambient pressure and temperature. I'm not really sure at what temp this compression was performed but ice vii is known to exist at room temp at high enough pre...

Steel composites integrating diamonds and carbon nanotubes

Incorporating hard materials like diamond or carbon nanotubes (CNTs) into steel presents unique challenges, particularly when using traditional melt processing techniques. Diamond, for example, is extremely difficult to integrate into steel via melting due to its thermal instability. However, diamond is routinely embedded in steel surfaces for cutting applications. In the electronics industry, steel wires coated with diamond are used to slice silicon crystals into thin wafers. Two main techniques are commonly employed for embedding diamond in metals: 1. Electroplating: Diamond powder is suspended in a metal ion electrolyte, usually nickel. When an electric current is applied, nickel deposits on the metal wire, trapping the diamond particles in place. 2. Sintering: For more demanding cutting tools, diamond can be embedded on metal surfaces using sintering, which fuses the particles to the substrate at high temperatures without melting the metal. Similar challenges exist when attempting ...

Is there a future for materials science students in tribology?

My comments on a reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/materials/comments/1nmooy5/comment/nfg6vub/ Tribology is a very important subfield of Mat sci and highly relevant anywhere there are moving parts. Like many other materials science domains its cross disciplinary and overlaps with automotive , aerospace ,manufacturing and even nano systems. I think its definitely worth studying and one should atleast know about core concepts. From a purely research point of view the field is quite deep especially as it is being developed for nano systems and other emerging areas like triboluminescence. It does have a future. Wear is one of the major failure mechanism in materials and lots of resources are allocated to minimise it. Turbines,engine components, tyres ,cutting tools all suffer from wear and constant monitoring and refinement of process parameters is necessary.Many coatings are designed to reduce friction and wear Diamond like carbon films are cutting edge if you can build some...

What IMC 2025 Revealed About the State of Telecom

IMC 2025 lived up to its reputation as India's most anticipated communication event attracting big industry players—Intel,Qualcomm,Mediatek,Ericsson,Nokia along with research institutions and startups. All the 7 layers of the networking stack from the PHY to APPLICATION were well represented by various organisations. Mobile operators serve as the face of the network but we often forget that they are powered by a long list of manufacturers and service providers. IMC gave them a platform to showcase their products and directly engage with customers. 5G is already here and very predictably there were talks around whether it has delivered on the promises it made. Speakers shared their thoughts and while the general consensus was that 5G did bring about somewhat faster speeds and a bit of lower latency the massive promises that it made especially around remote healthcare AR,VR and smart cities have all been forgotten. mmwave is no where to be seen or even heard of. It's qui...

Unlocking the Potential of Carbon for Long-Distance Electrical Transmission

ABSTRACT: We present a technique to manufacture large scale carbon based conductors for transmission of electrical energy over continental scale distances. We start by identifying precursors that could be used for production processes.We review the current manufacturing techniques of producing carbon based fibers and explain why certain precursors have dominated carbon materials industry. We identify methods that can be used to increase the yield through alternative precursors.We put forward a theory of why carbon conductors have less conductivity than metals and what can be done to improve it. Finally we postulate that with cheaper production methods even if carbon based conductors are 10 times less effective than poor metallic conductors like steel, they can still outperform them in High Voltage transmission lines if cheap manufacturing techniques could be developed. INTRODUCTION: Copper and in certain very specific applications aluminium & silicon steels dominate when it co...

Do electrons really flow as a beam in cathode ray tubes?

Abstract: It is generally well accepted that a beam of electrons flow from cathode to anode in a cathode ray tube. Taking pressure data from a variety of sources from CRT manufacturers’ data sheets to engineering documents of large hadron colliders we show through calculations that there is enough residual gas in these devices to form a conducting path from anode to cathode due to plasma formation. When high voltages are applied at the anode the gas is ionized and becomes a plasma forming a ‘wire’ between the two electrodes that causes conduction of energy. The objective of this brief note is to encourage scientists and engineers to re-investigate commonly accepted beliefs about vacuum tubes and develop new knowledge that can revitalize the field especially at a time when nano scaled vacuum channel transistors are being envisioned. Most vacuum tubes have operating pressures in the ultra high vacuum range. This is true for cathode ray tubes, vacuum tu...

Perspective from EU Research & Innovation (R&I) Days 2025

I thank the European Commission for organising European Research & Innovation (R&I) Days 2025 and giving me a chance to participate in the event discussing the future of European research. Europe has had a long and storied tradition of science with philosophers like Locke,Hobbes,Descartes,Spinoza laying the groundwork for a scientific revolution producing the finest scientists who pushed the boundaries of human knowledge ,ushered the industrial revolution and birthed the modern world. Yet today the EU finds itself at crossroads struggling to retain talent and capitalise on its inventions. Horizon Europe defines key enabling technologies that could propel the EU far ahead of its competitors. Past Records show that Europe has the capability to do it. Its achievements in electronics,semiconductors,wind energy and development of advanced composites like GLARE are a testament to its enterprising citizens. Europe has made strong contributions in open source software and while some of...

Force calculations on electron in vacuum tubes

ABSTRACT A claim was made in the paper titled “Do electrons really flow as a beam in cathode ray tubes? ” where we asserted that electrons remain near the cathode surface during the operation of CRT. Here we do force calculations on electrons by estimating the debye length of electrons emitted after thermionic emission and show that under given applied voltages if electrons are placed at debye length they are sufficiently far away from the cathode surface to be accelerated towards it. Debye length, while typically used to measure charge screening distance in plasmas and electrolytes, can also be used to estimate the distance of emitted electrons from the cathode surface. In the same way debye length is used to calculate the thickness of an electrical double layer in which the surface charge and charge on inner helmholtz plane are immobile & the charges on outer helmholtz plane are mobile we can model emitted electrons as mobile charges & image charges distributed on the cathode...

Notes by Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Search This Blog