Designer crafts shatter-proof beer glass
TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: A British company has designed some new glasses — beer glasses. The government asked the company to come up with something shatter-proof to cut down on the number of injuries in pub fights. Marketplace’s Stephen Beard reports from London.
Pub-goer: Can you get me a pint of Harp please! And two pints of Kronenburg!
Stephen Beard: The Brits love their beer. They quaff 126 million pints of it a week.
Sadly, the result is a large amount of drunken violence. Every year, almost 90,000 people here are injured with a beer glass. The cost in health care and policing: more than $200 million.
So the government commissioned designer Matt Cotterill to come up with a shatterproof pint glass. His first solution: a coating of bio-resin.
Matt Cotterill: It’s a clear coating on the inside of a glass which can be applied to any glass. And the benefit, really, is it offers containment.
[Sound of a glass shatter]
Cotterill: So that when the glass breaks, as you can see here, the loose shards are held together those very dangerous edges aren’t exposed.
He says the new model would cost about the same as the traditional pint glass and could be available within a year. Critics say there’s a better way to minimize drunken violence: deter people from drinking by taxing booze more heavily.
In London, this is Stephen Beard for Marketplace.
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