As a perfect start in 2022, which is officially the International Year of Glass, Stoelzle Oberglas, headquarters of the Stoelzle Glass Group, has successfully completed the rebuild and expansion of its flint furnace, a EUR 22 million investment, focused on making the production site more efficient and also more sustainable in terms of energy efficiency and CO2 emissions.
The new furnace will reach a daily capacity of around 270 tons of melted glass. State-of-the-art melting technology will reduce the amount of energy used in the melting process by an estimated 13 percent per ton of glass. Improved E-boosting allows to use more green electricity in a flexible way in order to reduce the consumption of natural gas.
New batch formulas, which are based on the use of PCR glass and secondary raw materials, have been tested successfully throughout the past months. Examinations in the Stoelzle in-house glass lab proved that the so-called Flint Prestige Recycling glass, which has already been recognized by the Austrian Trigos sustainability award, will reduce CO2 emissions by 16 percent and energy consumption by 4 percent without compromising the high glass quality and brilliant flint colour.
The new furnace and the new batch compositions are two of the main milestones on the Glass Group’s roadmap towards decreasing the CO2 emissions by 50 percent by 2030. The investments include three new state of the art IS machines and several new cold end quality control machines as well as packaging robots.
Having successfully accomplished this important project, Stoelzle can now head towards the next milestones on its sustainability roadmap to 2030. The focus has been set on a group level on reducing further energy consumption and CO2 emissions by developing and re-thinking processes and techniques, not only in production but also in decoration of high quality packaging glass.