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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Here's a video of a guy dropping said unbreakable glass 3 times and breaking it:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NIAbt_GxPsg

The problem with unbreakable glass is once it hits a really hard material, like a grain of quartz, or a ceramic fragment, it breaks just the same.

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Short tangential story:

My grandfather many decades ago came home with a pack of "unbreakable" glasses. My grandmother asked why he had bought them. He shrugged and replied "well, if you don't want them..." and threw them all on the floor.

They all broke, of course.

My grandmother was not amused. She was a very serious person. The rest of the family is still laughing on 60 years later.

My aunt did that with a corningware plate. "This is unbreakable" then proceeded to yeet it on the concrete floor covered in linoleum. It was quiet an impressive splash of splinters everywhere.

Shatter resistant is a better term. :) Or as Jerryrigeverything says 'glass is glass'.

My mother did the exact same thing. When I was a kid we hosted a 3 refugee sisters who were new to Canada. Despite a significant language barrier my mother tried to explain the dinnerware was unbreakable and they didn't need to worry about it too much. She tossed a plate on the floor to demonstrate. It landed on edge and shattered everywhere. The poor refugees were so confused about why this white woman has just destroyed a perfectly good plate.

It doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it lasts much longer it's already a big win.

I have a few glasses with handles from the fifties (or as far back as the twenties, there's no stamp on them) that are quite brittle and will for sure break at the bottom if you pour hot water in them.

Seems to me like they last long enough when taken care of, and in situations where you don't the "unbreakable" glass splinters into a rather nasty dust like material.

I like the drinking glasses from hardened glass. When they break, they shatter into a lot of almost cubic pieces, not into little syringe like splinter like regular glass.

Is it? Based on what metric.

If a glass costs €1 and lasts 1 year, and an unbreakable glass costs €10 and lasts 5 years, that's not a big win.

Not if going out and buying the glasses takes time, or if storing additional spare glasses takes precious space, or cleaning the broken glass takes workers' time, or if the broken glass could be a hazard, or there may be supply issues with getting the same uniform glasses years later, or any other number of reasons.

Oh the new version of the glasses will be cheaper, more durable, lighter, more energy efficient to make.

The point remains, longer lasting glasses may or may not be superior.

It is all about metrics and how you bend them to whatever you prefer. However, the more this deviates from actual reality, the more likely reality will eventually show up and bust the show in the most horrible way possible.

You don't know that when making the initial purchase.

The article talks about sustainability, so clearly Euro isn't the unit to measure that.

Ideally the cost would include all externalities and thus allow people to judge the value and bare the full cost.

But kWh, or grammes of glass, or carbon credits, or whatever you want.

Normal glass is very recyclable and doesn't require a lot of energy or resource to recycle. "Long life" glass may well not be recycled at all.

Glass production requires a lot of energy, doesn't it?

Creating glass requires a lot of energy, which should be reflected in its price. Chances are creating a much stronger glass will not be much more expensive than a normal glass.

The problem is really about who gets the benefit of the longevity - e.g. I feel that with LED lightbulbs etc it is mostly the producer who has soaked up the economic benefit. As a user you think it's going to last longer and then for one reason or another it doesn't - they've worked out how to introduce some unreliability.

Now you're paying 5x more for 1.5x life. etc etc.

I suspect that waste produced by broken glasses is so minuscule compared to the overall glass production/waste that this is largely irrelevant.

Edit: Apparently glass cookware and drinking glasses are often not recyclable. This seems like a more important aspect to improve than durability even if, again, still overall a small improvement compared to overall glass industry.

Broken glasses in bars, for example, have a lot more impacts than just waste.

Broken glass has to be cleaned up, causes injuries, even causes lost product in some situations.

I was in a cocktail bar once with three friends who ordered us the same chilled cocktail, served there day in, day out, and as the cocktails were poured into the glasses, three of the four glasses broke. Plink, plink, plink.

Glasses too hot, cocktail too cold, some other handling problem. Who knows. But tougher glass might not have done that.

That sounds like clutching at straws while not really showing how that'd make a significant difference to anything.

Make all glasses recyclable. Probably more important but less marketable for a new startup idea...

I don't think it is "clutching at straws" for a bar to want glasses that break less frequently, causing fewer safety concerns, and to be prepared to pay the extra, but whatever.

A friend used to work in a student bar as a bartender. Broken glass was legitimately a safety issue. Drunken people can cut themselves quite creatively, including severed sinews.

Ironically, most of his patrons were medical students.

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