Page 34 - Glass Machinery Plants & Accessories no. 3-2019

TRACEABILITY
Traceability
he industrial world of glass
is quickly evolving just like
T the needs of glassmakers,
bottlers and final consumers.
Today, traceability counts as
one of the growing challenges,
and the requested level of quality
keeps increasing.
Counterfeiting, distribution
channels control, returnable
loops, marketing needs and con-
sumer safety are topics pushing
the beverage industry to rethink
its strategy of the global process,
from the glassmaker to the con-
sumer.
In order to satisfy this need,
the glass industry is providing
three solutions:
1. Cold-end marking, which is a
limited solution to add a serial
number on the container but
can also damage the glass and
glass machinery plants & accessories 3/2019
32
affect the pressure resistance
of the container. Plus, it has
no value for glassmakers.
2. Hot-end marking with alpha-
numeric digits improves qual- a combination of datamatrix and
ity and process management,
but this kind of code is not
readable automatically and no
longer responds to bottlers’
requests.
3. 10 years ago, Tiama decided,
as the pioneer, to develop
datamatrix encoding at the
hot-end. This code pre-
sents many advantages as it
is unique, secure, redundant
and resistant on every con-
tainer and remains all along
the product life cycle, from
the gob to the final consumer.
Individual container traceabil-
ity will drastically shake up the
way of managing containers and
their contents. It enables to trace
the origin of a bottle at any time,
while providing information such
as the exact time of production at
the hot-end, cavity number, line
number and even more.
HOT-END LASER ENGRAVING
Total Tracer is Tiama’s
machine placed at the hot-end to
engrave this unique code on every
container produced. Thanks to its
CO2 laser, accuracy of engrav-
ing on a very small area of glass
allows very high quality of engrav-
ing, with a level of precision that
prevents counterfeiting. Indeed,
it is easy to add a fake code on
the glass once the bottle is on the
market, but impossible to obtain
the same quality compared to
what we are doing at 500°C or
more.
A standard matrix is a
16-column per 16 lines, 8mm
x 8mm square, and offers 24
numerical digits encoded.
It is almost invisible and can be
placed on several locations such
as heel or neck.
Tiama offers the opportunity
to encode additional information
such as plant number, GS1 ID
or any internal data that could be
useful for tracing.
Total Tracer can also engrave
digits, to have additional readable
information for operators.