Published 8th July, 2020 by Greg Morris

"CETIE, whose members include Emhart, O-I, Tiama and Verallia, discuss a single, universal method which can trace each individual glass container.

In the food industry, traceability is absolutely essential, not only for foodstuffs but also for other components which come into contact with the food: the primary packaging.

For the best possible traceability, we need to be able to identify the object that we want to trace, at any point in the value chain (when the packaging is produced, when it is filled, at the various storage and distribution points, and especially when it reaches the end consumer). This individual identification system means we can retrieve key information regarding the object: the supplier, the exact time and place of production, which can help us work out the exact conditions in which it was manufactured (settings used in the process, material used, personnel involved) and potentially analyse anomalies detected at any point in the value chain.

What may seem like a simple prospect becomes more complicated when glass containers, bottles and jars are involved. There are several obstacles that hinder tracing these receptacles:

• Once a glass manufacturer has blow-moulded and shaped the bottles, they undergo a series of stages, theoretically in the order in which they were produced, but this is not necessarily the case. So when they are stacked on a pallet holding one to two thousand bottles, the pallet is identified but it may contain bottles produced at slightly different times, and not necessarily consecutively. It is the pallet itself which carries identification markings, and not the bottles. This reduces the amount of objects traced, but prevents tracing of each individual container.
• As for the bottler, they must conserve the link between the bottle used and the pallet to which it belonged. This creates a connection between incoming and outgoing products, so that we can trace which pallet of empty bottles the finished product came from, if necessary. This is so as long as the bottling line precisely records the first and last bottles on the pallet, which is rarely the case.
• As it is indexed to the production machine, it can tell which section of the machine each bottle has come from, and can therefore determine which mould was used to make the bottle out of the many moulds in place on the machine at any one time, in general from 12 to 36. This information is crucial for tracing glassware.
• Its software is able to modify the code for each bottle, so that it engraves a unique code on every bottle.

These limitations and relative imprecision, could be overcome if each bottle could be individually identified as soon as it was moulded. (...)"

Read the article  https://www.glass-international.com/features/tracing-each-glass-container

DT40.00 - DATAMATRIX HOT-END LASER MARKING ON GLASS CONTAINERS