Sheffield First - Alcohol - everyone's business

Sheffield Drug & Alcohol Action Team in partnership with the City Centre Safer Neighbourhood Team are distributing thousands of polycarbonate glasses free of charge to licensed premises in Sheffield. These glasses are virtually indestructible and do not fragment on impact like glass.

The City Centre Safer Neighbourhood Team carried out trials in six city centre licensed premises during this year’s ‘Carnage Night’ (a traditional yearly student event), in order to find out how well the city centre drinker’s respond to using these as an alternative to glass products. 80% said that they would feel safer in a bar that didn’t use glass. Once licensees were convinced that using polycarbonate glasses would not affect their trade they were receptive to the idea of using these as an alternative to traditional glassware.

Replacing glass stock with polycarbonate stock can run into thousands of pounds for the larger licensed premises and is a sometimes a barrier to more businesses using them. To help overcome this the DAAT purchased a further 100,000 glasses, which will help around 70 licensed premises with the highest risk of having a glassing incident to replace their entire glass stock with polycarbonate stock.

This polycarbonate initiative complements other interventions to reduce alcohol-related harm in Sheffield by creating a safer night time economy.

Safer night time economy

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