Sputtering technique
© Bormioli Luigi
Bormioli Luigi has adopted a strategy driven by agility. The glassmaker’s ambition is to support its customers with a strong vision, new capabilities, and sustainable innovation. Simone Baratta, Director of Bormioli's Perfume & Prestige Business Unit explains.
What is behind the current dynamic?
We salute our customers’ laudable performance and their ability to provide a new generation of consumers with innovative, attractive, and sustainable products that respect luxury codes. This is generating strong demand for beauty products, especially perfumes. Now it’s up to us to absorb the pressure that this puts on industrial capacity and availability.
Simone Baratta, Director of Bormioli's Perfume & Prestige Business Unit ©Bormioli Luigi
How is Bormioli Luigi adapting to these changes?
This year, we are finalizing a €200 million investment plan, which includes the conversion of our Spanish site, where glass production capacity, until now focused on tableware, is being redirected towards beauty. By 2024, this site will enable the Group to increase its overall production by a third. At the same time, we are adapting our decorating capacities at our sites in Italy and Spain. This production agility goes hand in hand with more sustainable, energy-efficient processes. Bormioli Luigi is a pioneer in process electrification, and electricity already powers 65% of our glass production. This remains a priority, along with renewable energies, in our effort to reduce our carbon footprint by 50% between 2016 and 2030.
What other measures are you taking to encourage sustainable innovation in your bottle design?
We are taking action on several fronts by promoting lighter weight products like ecoLine, as well as integrating more PCR into our creations. The company is adapting to demand for refillable products and to the trend to replace plastic with longer-lasting glass, for example on caps or make-up products. In terms of decoration, we encourage our customers to choose less impactful finishing processes such as sputtering, which produces the effect of a translucent lacquer without impacting the bottle’s recyclability. We are working to systematically reduce the use of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by prioritizing water-soluble products (lacquers, inks, catalysts, pigments) that use water as a solvent. Sustainability is truly a cross-functional area of development for our Group that encompasses everything from glass production to bottle design to respond to market growth and the needs of our customers.
