Adian Pangilinan had just put the family dinner in the oven: marinated chicken nestled inside a glass Pyrex cooking dish. Pangilinan has cooked this meal the same way many times in the past, uneventfully.
Nevertheless, when a loud noise rang out in the kitchen a few minutes after he placed the chicken in the lower rack of the pre-heated oven, he said he knew something was wrong.
“It just exploded, it sounded like a bomb went off,” he told Global News in an interview, describing how the dish blew into small pieces.
“It was shocking to see glass flowing out of the oven — that doesn’t happen every day.”
Pangilinan and his wife received Pyrex cookware through a wedding registry a few years ago. The couple have used the dishes frequently to cook meals for themselves and their two young daughters.
“It was supposed to last us a lifetime,” Pangilinan said, referring to marketing claims for Pyrex.
The Pyrex brand is more than a century old. More than four million pieces of cookware were sold to American consumers by 1919, according to the company’s history.
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However, sometime in the 1990s, the manufacturer Corning changed the way it manufactured Pyrex. It began using soda lime silicate glass, rather than borosilicate. It was a switch the company said would increase the glassware’s ability to tolerate dropping.
Yet one glass expert says it makes the cookware more prone to shattering because of changes in temperature.
“That (soda lime silicate glass) glass expands and contracts at a rate three times higher than borosilicate glass and that’s one of the fundamentals behind its greater propensity to break and shatter and explode when there’s rapid cooling,” said Mark Meshulam, a glass and window expert in Northbrook, Ill.
In the U.S., lawyers launched class action lawsuits after consumers complained about injuries after Pyrex glassware shattered.
Meshulam said any kind of wear-and-tear damage to Pyrex could affect its performance.
“If the glass had some pre-existing scratches or flaws in it, it would become weaker… that when the temperature went up… the stresses inside the glass built up sufficiently to the point where the glass would break,” he said.
“Pyrex glassware has an exceptional safety record. Based on reports made to the company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, less than one tenth of one percent of the millions of Pyrex products sold each year experience thermal breakage, and there has never been any recall of Pyrex glassware,” a Corelle Brands spokesperson told Global News in an email.
“In the unusual circumstance where breakage occurs, we will evaluate the situation and work closely with the customer to resolve the issue. While as a matter of company policy, we do not comment on ongoing litigation, it is public information that pieces of Pyrex glassware have been manufactured from soda lime glass since the 1950s.”
Meanwhile, Pangilinan said he is hesitant about using Pyrex cookware again.
“I’m concerned because I have small kids. I know what parental safety concerns are like these days,” he said.
“I do not want to see anyone else go through that. It can be very dangerous.”
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