I had a classic little kitchen accident today : dropped a glass on the floor, shattering it into big and small pieces. So I thought : man! glass is terrible, the way it shatters when you drop it.
Well, there’s plastic cups (no, those will not do), and melamine, which is a resin. I have some melamine serving trays, but I still prefer glass over melamine for dinnerware and well, a drinking glass.
For flat surfaces and touch-screen devices, there’s ‘gorilla glass’, the patented sheet glass from Corning Inc. It is manufactured through immersion of the glass sheet in a molten alkaline salt bath. An ion exchange in the chemical process produces a stronger surface that also prevents cracks from propagating. On November 20, Corning introduced Gorilla Glass 4, which was a significant improvement over Gorilla Glass 3 and also most other competing cover glass in the market.