You might not realise it, but members of the glass community have a huge impact on your day-to-day life – especially during a pandemic! Here are just a few of these heroes who’ve been helping us during these difficult times:
Glass production teams
Glass containers are essential for storing, transporting and safely preserving medicines, food and drink. Glass producers across the world have played a vital role in the battle against COVID and in maintaining everyday life, by going into work every day to create containers, protect important supply chains and ensure consumers don’t face shortages.
A number of our glass production teams have also been involved in repurposing glass bottles for hand sanitiser production, helping frontline workers to stay safe.
Supermarket staff
These heroes have ensured our shop shelves stayed stocked throughout the crisis, helping everyone to access the food, drink and medical supplies they need to survive. In a context where contact with other people can pose serious health risks, their work cannot be undervalued. Thank you!
Municipal collection workers
Collecting our recycling and rubbish even at the height of the crisis, these frontline workers have kept our streets clean and maintained crucial recycled material supplies for packaging producers. Glass is 100% and infinitely recyclable in a closed loop, but only while our municipal collection workers are able to bring used glass back into the loop. As so many glass containers are produced with recycled glass today, every bottle and jar collected by these workers contributed to the next production cycle, and the containers of that production cycle would have been used to transport our essential supplies of food, drink and pharmaceuticals. 100kg of recycled glass can replace as much as 120kg of virgin materials, so they also helped to keep down the environmental impact of glass production!
Of course, these are just some of the people who have been keeping our society running over the last few months. Do you know someone who should be recognised?
If so, give us a shout @friendsofglass! We’ll happily add them to the list.