O-I Glass' Sustainable Production of Sustainable Glass Packaging
Leadership Update on O-I Sustainability Journey
Originally Published in O-I 2022 Sustainability Report
At O-I, we love glass – and we are not alone. The United Nations has declared 2022 to be the International Year of Glass. And it is easy to see why. Glass is a key ingredient for modern life. Glass has transformed and elevated cityscapes, architecture, vehicle design, art, and the gigabit speeds at which we live our digital lives. Glass has also transformed our relationship with food and beverages, not only by providing shelf-stable packaging but also enabling brand-defining and beautifully distinctive designs.
The contributions of glass go beyond its beauty, utility, and transformative power. Glass is made from a few basic ingredients and has localized supply chains. It is already widely recycled and has been for decades. Glass is an infinitely recyclable material, inert, and does not raise ocean pollution, waste, and food contact issues of other materials. In contrast, others depend on far-flung global supply chains, present waste problems if not recycled, or need future invention to be widely recycled or recyclable at all. Glass has none of these challenges – today or tomorrow.
Glass is being recognized by the U.N. because the sum-total of its benefits advance the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and are a necessary part of building a just, equitable, and sustainable global community. Whether glass is used for fiber optic cables, architecture, insulation, vaccine vials, or food and beverage containers, we agree wholeheartedly with the U.N. that we need more, not less, glass to ensure that we achieve the sustainable future to which we all aspire.
At O-I, we believe glass is the perfect material for sustainably protecting and showcasing the food and beverage products that are part of our daily lives. We also understand that the sustainability of any product depends on the sustainability of the processes and relationships the organization uses to produce it. True sustainability is not binary, a single-variable evaluation, or an end point. It is about a continuous quest to find and maintain the delicate balance that must exist among an organization and its products and the competing needs and outputs of other people, organizations, and the planet. Our commitment to transform how we manufacture glass is an essential component in our quest to achieve this big-picture balance that is sustainability.
For more than 100 years, O-I has innovated and transformed how glass packaging is made and sold – starting with Michael Owens’s invention of the machine that enabled mass production of glass containers. Innovation is in our DNA and we continue to reimagine how we will sustainably evolve every aspect of our business, from our glass-making technology and processes to our customer approach and how we support our people and communities. Reducing, reusing, and recycling are necessary to a sustainable future but alone are not sufficient to get the job done. True sustainability depends on continuously transforming everything from the fuels, processes, and technologies we use to the relationships we have with our suppliers, customers, communities, and our nearly 25,000 employees.
In this year’s report on our 2021 results, we detail the transformative steps forward in our processes, products, and our interconnected relationships with our stakeholders. The progress we have made along our sustainability journey goes beyond balancing products and processes – it also involves our work to fully integrate sustainability into how we govern and resource our business.
Our holistic, systems-based approach to addressing sustainability has resulted in progress for our operations: increasing energy efficiency, upgrading our furnaces with gas-oxygen technology, advancing lightweighting of our products, creating more resilient supply chains, and partnering with our stakeholders. The progress shared in this report is a result of continuous engagement with our customers, suppliers, employees, and communities to align our sustainable focus with the evolving needs of an ever-changing ecosystem. This work, and more, is moving us and our communities toward a truly circular economy for packaging that leverages the infinite recyclability of glass.
We understand that responsible production for packaging, combined with a trusted, ethical approach to business is important to our customers, and their customers. We are proud to share our governance and oversight structure that reinforces our high standards of conduct in everything we do. And our holistic approach to sustainability, combined with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, are the foundation of this trust and guide us in our approach to sustainability.
Our success in advancing our sustainable journey has been the result of maintaining this focus, which has led to gains and efficiencies that have benefited our business and environmental footprint. We have prioritized increasing renewable electricity. By year-end 2021, we have purchased renewable electricity certificates covering 27% of our global electricity consumption – against a goal of 40% by 2030. We also have accelerated innovative projects for energy-efficient melting, which are transforming our manufacturing systems to be the bestin-class and helping accelerate the percentage of recycled glass used in our processes. These efforts, and others, have lowered our absolute emissions 13.5% against our 2017 baseline. We look forward to hitting our goal of 25% reduction by 2030.
These pages contain insights on our climate-change roadmap and how our strategic pillars – increased cullet usage, transformative technology, renewable electricity, and greater energy efficiency – will accelerate our progress while we engineer and innovate to use lowercarbon fuels as they become commercially available. We will share the ways we are reimagining and reinventing the business model for glass packaging to create a future where the innate circularity of glass meets O-I’s disruptive MAGMA melting technology and other innovations to change how glass is made and sold.
A sustainable future for glass packaging involves not just the use of cleaner gas-oxygen fuels and improved hybrid technology in traditional furnaces, but also O-I’s revolutionary MAGMA melting technology capable of using less refined recycled glass, biofuels, and other carbon-neutral renewable sources of energy.
The report also highlights innovative programs O-I is pioneering to reduce natural resource usage and generate increased cullet availability through the building of sophisticated ecosystems that drive glass recycling and increase recycled content in our products. In 2021, we engaged in 49 closed-loop glass recovery systems across the globe, including four new programs in the U.S., in which our customers return their scrap container glass directly to our furnaces. We continued building our Glass4Good™ community recycling program by initiating nine programs with two becoming fully operational by the end of 2021.
As leaders in glass packaging, we’re committed to re-balancing the narrative around glass. The end of 2021 marked the second year of our Glass Advocacy Campaign in the strategic North American market. The campaign leverages social media to target consumers and industry influencers with relevant, engaging, and impactful messages about the benefits of glass. Those messages have reached 105 million Americans on average 12 times, generating 1.35 billion impressions. It’s quite clear that #TeamGlass is growing and generating ambassadors.
In 2021, we developed a broadened DE&I roadmap, establishing a strategic framework to drive improvement. We created a global DE&I community with ambassadors from all country groups, held a global Day of Understanding event, made LGBTQ+ allyship training available, added Martin Luther King Day as a companyrecognized holiday in the U.S., and held our fourth consecutive International Women’s Day celebration. We are working to further enhance our global strategy starting by implementing DE&I policies and practices across our employee experience and empowering grassroots improvement initiatives.
As we strive to be the most innovative, sustainable, and chosen supplier of brand-building packaging solutions, we are building a strong, resilient organization designed for the future. Glass has endured the test of time for millennia, yet it has never been so modern and relevant. We are proud of our sustainable advancements and our 25,000 passionate glassmakers that make us more sustainable each day. We hope you are inspired by our progress and join us in celebrating the International Year of Glass.
