As the global glass industry grapples with questions around decarbonisation and energy efficiency, the social and regulatory pressure for the industry to find the quickest route to decarbonisation increases at an ever faster rate. The key challenge to enable this quick transition is to ensure collaboration across a highly competitive industry with a risk averse production process.

Glass Futures is creating a Global centre of excellence in glass manufacturing, which will include a 30 tonne per day open access glass research manufacturing facility.  In January 2020 Glass Futures was awarded £7.1m by the UK Government to investigate and demonstrate low carbon fuel technologies for the glass sector , which includes lab-scale combustion trials of hydrogen and major industrial demonstrations of bio-fuels. This talk will give an overview of the challenges and successes of Glass Futures efforts to bring a new approach to collaboration across the global glass industry, highlighting the steps the global glass industry must take over the coming 10 years to increase the rate of innovation and public image of glass as a low carbon material.  

Aston Fuller Aston is the General Manager of Glass Futures and has worked in the Glass industry for over 10 years. Aston spent 8 years with Ardagh Glass gaining experience in furnace management, operation, maintenance and capital construction and wider plant engineering and energy management before working with British Glass and GTS on wider cullet recycling research projects before joining Glass Futures. With a keen interest in entrepreneurship and innovation especially in relation to sustainability Aston has over the past few years developed a passion for driving change in sustainable engineering, manufacturing and in helping open knowledge of the glass industry to a younger generation of engineers.