Climate neutrality – Glass Fibre

Glass Fibre Europe supports the European Green Deal and the European Union’s objective to become climate neutral by 2050. The industry’s contribution to this objective will be two-fold:

On one-hand, the industry will continue manufacturing and developing new products and solutions, enabling the transition in key sectors of the economy. Find more (here) about the contribution of our products to the carbon neutrality objective.

On the other hand, the glass fibre industry will continue reducing the carbon footprint of the products it manufactures – for instance by developing new technologies. Discover below how the European industry reduced its total direct emissions by 1/3 since 2005 and the challenges ahead.

The glass fibre industry has the ambition to become climate neutral by 2050. The coming challenges ahead are manifold, with only two investment cycles left for its furnaces and an enabling framework still to be deployed. Access to sufficiently available and competitive carbon neutral energy, development of relevant infrastructure, effective protection against unfair trade practices as well as new market opportunities related to sustainable products, are key conditions to ensure the industry stays globally competitive during the transition.

Since 2005, the continuous filament glass fibre sector has reduced its total direct emissions by one third (source: reported emissions in European Union Transaction Log (EUTL, 2022)). This is a remarkable achievement considering the fact that a quarter of the sector’s emissions are ‘process emissions’ which cannot be reduced by a reduction in energy demand or a switch to alternative energy sources.

The industry implemented several measures in its manufacturing sites that contributed to an estimated reduction in CO₂ emissions of over 200kt/CO2 per year during the same period (source: reported emissions in European Union Transaction Log (EUTL). These measures to reduce the manufacturing emissions can be classified in 5 main fields of actions.

Raw material

Raw materials release CO2 when they are melted in the furnace. To reduce these emissions, the industry used internal recycled glass and/or decarbonated raw material as alternative raw material.

Furnace

The industry constantly works at improving the design, construction and process control of its installations. These measures, coupled with an increase in furnace capacity, made significant savings possible.

Melting process

The European installations have considerably improved their melting process with the high uptake of technologies such as oxy-fuel, top fire burners, electric boost, waste heat recovery or staged combustion.

Energy

Over the last decades, the European industry has completely phased out the use of fuel-oil in its installations. Today, the furnaces are fueled with natural gas coupled with electric boosting (the latter providing from up to 40% of the total energy)

Bushing

The bushing is the cornerstone of the glass fiberization. The constant optimisation of bushings contributed to the reduction in emissions in the installations.

Achieving carbon neutrality in the industry is a monumental challenge. To be carbon neutral, the glass fibre industry will have to overcome in the next two decades two major technology hurdles: 1°) the current absence of technology ready options for switching to carbon neutral energy and 2°) the significant share of ‘process emissions’ in the total emissions which cannot be reduced by an energy switch.

The glass fibre industry is taking up the challenge, and it has identified 4 potential routes for further reducing its manufacturing emissions in the coming decades. Turning these potentials into options is going to require tremendous efforts from the industry and an unprecedented transformation of the European Union as a whole. The categories below describe the potential routes identified by the glass fibre industry, the barriers to overcome, and actions required to activate these routes.