Roadmap | AGC Glass Europe

To reduce our carbon emissions, all parts of the value chain need to be taken into consideration. This includes decarbonising the glass production processes as well as eliminating all CO₂ emissions from the supply chain upstream of our processes and other indirect emissions. The scope 1, measuring the direct emissions, is at the heart of our processes, but the scope 2 (CO₂ emitted to produce the electricity) and mostly the scope 3 (CO₂ emitted to produce and transport the raw materials and the finished goods) are important as well. In 2025, Scope 1 represented 48% of our CO₂ footprint, Scope 2 is at 5% and Scope 3 amounts to 47%.

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Roadmap to carbon reduction

Our ambition is to develop a holistic approach that will impact the three scopes. This trajectory is called the “AGC roadmap to carbon reduction”. Several actions are targeted:

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Sustainable sourcing of raw materials

The nature and type of raw materials used has a great impact on AGC’s CO₂ emissions. The manufacturing processes of our suppliers are not equal regarding their CO₂ emissions and, logistics can vary a lot. AGC has started discussions and onsite audits of the different suppliers to better understand their current situation and their plans, including logistics. This will impact the selection process of our suppliers. This CO₂ dimension will come on top of aspects such as costs or quality specifications.

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Using highly efficient melting furnaces

AGC is engaged in a major transformation of the tank technology. The industry standard is an air/gas combustion system. The two steps electrification innovation, electro-boosting and then hybrid melting, is a major technology breakthrough. Furthermore, additional efforts are done on the overall energy efficiency of our systems.

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Increasing the use of cullet

Cullet is glass waste, it is glass that is not usable anymore, but it can be re-melted indefinitely to produce new glass. There is glass waste at the primary glass manufacturing plants, at our our customers plants, when manufacturing windows, and at the end of life, after a window renovation or once a building is demolished.

1 tonne of cullet allows to save 1.2 tonnes of raw materials. Cullet also lowers the energy need as the energy need is lower than with fresh raw materials.

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Using low carbon electricity

The electrification process will significantly increase the electricity consumption while reducing the fossil energy, as natural gas. It is then crucial that the emission factor of that electricity is low. This is called low carbon electricity. There are different ways to get this kind of energy: self-production via windmills or photovoltaic panels or specific contracts with energy producers, such as a PPA, a purchase power agreement, or guarantees of origin certificates.

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Low-carbon process for Low-Carbon Glass transformation

Low-carbon laminated glass and low-carbon coated glass are produced on selected production lines showing optimized yield and using only AGC’s Low-Carbon glass substrate. These processing lines are powered fully by low-carbon electricity. For low-carbon laminated glass clear, we use only specific low-carbon PVB with 35% lower embedded CO2 equivalent.

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Optimising transport

For finishing processes. Float glass goes through a series of finishing processes before ending as a wide variety of finished products with added value. This requires multiple internal shipments from one manufacturing plant to another one, and has a considerable impact on our CO₂ emissions. Over the last years we have reduced this internal footprint by minimizing useless transports and maximizing the number of finishing operations at one location.

For finished products. The shipments of finished products to our customers are also to be organized in an efficient way to minimize the carbon footprint. Interesting multimodal systems, combining trucks and trains, have been developed.

Our roadmap to carbon reduction