Cheers to safer pint glasses

Happy St Patrick's Day! I'm not Irish but I still like to celebrate St Patrick's Day as though I am. Every year I try to get to my local Irish pub to have a pint of Guinness and a pie.

In my experience, St Patrick’s Day celebrations can sometimes get a little rowdy. If you’re celebrating St Patrick’s Day tonight, remember to keep an eye on your pint glass. There are about 87,000 violent incidents a year involving glass a year in the UK.

 
Safer pint glasses
Hopefully within the next few years pub brawls involving glass will be a thing of the past – new glasses that don’t shatter in the same way as normal ones are on the way. The new glasses have been created as part of the Design Out Crime programme, an initiative from the Home Office’s Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime and the Design Council.

Designed to be safer, but also a more popular alternative to plastic, the two new designs are the first major advance in glassware for pubs since the 1960s. They are:

• Glass Plus - looks just like a regular pint glass but has a thin transparent coating of bio-resin on the inside. This makes it stronger and if the glass is broken it binds together dangerous shards - drastically reducing the likelihood of injury to customers and staff.
• Twin Wall - a revolutionary design, made by bonding two ultra-thin layers of glass together in a concept similar to laminated car windscreens. It makes the pint glass extremely difficult to break, but in the event that it does smash, any dangerous shards would be safely held together by a layer of resin.

I think it’s great that design is being used to help prevent crime. These glasses look great and let’s be honest, anything that helps keep us safer on nights out is definitely a good thing.
 
If you're interested in designing out crime and the future of the humble pint glass, watch the video from the Home Office.
 

 
Cheers to a safer pint this St Patrick's Day.