Re: Avoiding Metals & Borosilicate Glass

My understanding is that borosilicate glass is more expensive to produce than the newer tempered glass that both Pyrex and Anchor Hocking now use. Corning sold its Pyrex consumer products division in 1998 and is now run by a corporation called World Kitchen, which has since started to use cheaper tempered soda-lime glass.

I'm not sure of the contents themselves being harmful, but I'd like to send out a warning of more imminent danger from using glass bakeware produced after 1998.
Since that year, hundreds of complaints have been filed with Consumer Affairs regarding injuries sustained due to glass either breaking or actually exploding.

Of course, glass is prone to breaking with extreme sudden temperature changes. However, the glass used nowadays allegedly is either not evenly tempered or loses its temper once heated too high. Some of the complaints were due to even the most minor temperature changes that occur when opening and closing the oven door. Sometimes it appeared to happen from exposure to the air outside of the oven. The horrific results were glass bits actually blowing up in people's faces and sticking into walls and ceilings 15 feet or farther from the dish, broken shards of glass cutting people and causing muscular and nerve damage, scalding liquids burning legs and feet, and hot shards of glass burning kitchen floors. One woman even claims she bought her glass measuring cup from Target on a Sunday, used it to measure some Bisquik pancake mix, then at 3:15 am the next morning she heard the sound of breaking glass coming from her kitchen. Her glass measuring cup had exploded in her cabinet; it wasn’t near any heat sources.

Read for yourself:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2008/08/pyrex.html


As for the lead content, I'm guessing that Bodum advertises "no lead" because lead in kitchen ware is such a huge scare nowadays. I don't know about lead or other hazardous content in the tempered or borosilicate glass, but I'd be interested to know more about it and I'll be sure to post if I do, and meanwhile, I hope others are cautious with using glassware, as it's not made today the way it once was. Tweet