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Consumers have been noticing for years that sometimes their Pyrex brand cookware unexpectedly breaks during or shortly after use, often with such shatterings occurring in what seems like rather eruptive form. It is not unheard of for a Pyrex dish to suddenly explode (i.e., break apart in conjunction with a loud noise) while sitting in a hot oven or soon after it has been taken from one and is resting on a counter. Such breakage has to do with the nature of glass, which is the material used in the manufacture of this type of bakeware. When glass changes temperature rapidly, it experiences thermal shock, a process wherein different parts of the material expand by different amounts. Sometimes glass vessels are unable to take the stress of that uneven expansion and shatter. The October 2009 e-mail missive reproduced below suggests that Pyrex brand glass bakeware products sold in recent years are unacceptably (even unsafely) susceptible to breakage in ordinary use, and that current Pyrex products are inferior because the Pyrex brand, having since been sold to another company, is now manufactured from cheaper materials: First off, many consumers have come to regard Pyrex brand glass bakeware as practically indestructible and have been utterly shocked to find that it can break in what they consider to be the course of ordinary use. However, all brands of glass bakeware are susceptible to breakage under certain conditions, especially when subjected to sudden extreme changes in temperature. Different brands of glass bakeware have different usage guidelines, and what consumers consider ordinary use may not fall within those guidelines. (Particularly, many consumers have very different ideas of what terms such as freezer safe and microwave safe mean, ideas which are often not in accordance with government or manufacturer definitions.) Contrary to strong consumer perception, neither Pyrex glass bakeware nor any other brand is indestructible and should not be used in a manner that assumes it to be so. The e-mail quoted above states that the writer Googled exploding Pyrex dishes and got ten million hits. Exploding Pyrex is very common. As noted above, all glass bakeware is subject to thermal shock breakage; when this type of sudden breakage occurs, especially when accompanied by a sharp, loud sound, it is commonly described by consumers as an explosion. The reference to ten million search hits is a gross exaggeration, but many accounts of sudden breakage incidents involving Pyrex brand glass bakeware can be found on the Internet and elsewhere: Chicago station WBBM-TV reported in 2008 that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) had received 66 complaints about Pyrex incidents over the previous ten years and that the station counted approximately 300 more [complaints] reported over the last five years on consumer Web sites, particularly on the web site ConsumerAffairs.com, which has collected hundreds of reader-submitted complaints since 2006. But do these complaints really chronicle problems with a substandard and possibly unsafe product, or do they merely constitute a relatively small roll call of consumer misuse incidents that have focused scrutiny on a single company? Some accounts (like the one reproduced above) have claimed that Pyrex brand products are now more prone to shattering than they used to be, attributing this increase to the factor that while Pyrex products were originally made of borosilicate glass, the company's products now vended in the North American market are fashioned of tempered soda lime glass, a cheaper material. (The borosilicate glass version is still sold in Europe.) While it is literally true that the material used in manufacturing Pyrex brand glass bakeware has changed from borosilicate glass to soda lime glass, the brand's current owner, World Kitchen, claims that changeover began back in the 1940s and long antedates Corning's 1998 sale of the brand: In a January 2011 article on glass bakeware, Consumer Reports stated that they were unable to determine exactly when major U.S. manufacturers (including Pyrex) switched from soda lime glass to borosilicate glass: Some critics have maintained, nonetheless, that modern Pyrex brand glass bakeware is involved in a disproportionate number of dangerous shattering incidents, that it is inadequately tempered, and that the company's product instructions are insufficient. However, others (including World Kitchen) have criticized such claims as misleading, conjectural ones based on anecdote and misuse rather than on hard evidence and reliable documentation of manufacturing flaws. \ In January 2011, Consumer Reports published test results documenting that borosilicate glass bakeware was indeed more resistant to thermal shock breakage than heat-treated soda lime bakeware, but they acknowledged that their test conditions were contrary to instructions provided on the manufacturers' labels. World Kitchen itself states that it has received complaints from only a very small number of consumers about unexpected breakage, and notes that the CPSC has in fact found no safety issue with Pyrex glass bakeware: In a January 2011 article, Consumer Reports interviewed persons involved in 163 glass bakeware shattering incidents (some of whom admitted that they were using the bakeware against the safety instructions for any brand, including the original version of Pyrex) and noted that the CPSC had found 268 reports of [emergency room] visits for glass bakeware injuries in a sample of ER visits from 1998 through 2007 but did not provide a breakdown of the brands involved or the conditions under which the injuries occurred (while acknowledging that the statistic included injuries from glassware breaking when dropped). The CPSC estimated that a total of 11,882 such injuries had occurred nationwide during that period based on their sample size. The e-mail quoted above also claims in a tag line that World Kitchen is not a USA company, and its reference to China has led many readers to infer that all Pyrex brand bakeware is now manufactured in that country. However, World Kitchen, which now owns such popular kitchenware and tableware brands as Chicago Cutlery, Corelle, CorningWare, Magnalite, Pyrex, and Revere, is a subsidiary of WKI Holding Co. WKI is headquartered in Rosemont, Illinois, and manufactures products in the U.S. (Some Pyrex-branded products sold in the U.S., such as kitchen gadgets, are manufactured in China, but all the Pyrex brand glass bakeware products we've examined in U.S. retail stores have borne Made in USA labels.) As we noted at the head of this article, all glass bakeware is susceptible to breakage. All users of glass bakeware (regardless of brand) should follow some basic steps to minimize the possibility of such an occurrence:
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