Şişecam's 39th annual glass conference began this morning in Venice, Italy.
The event started with a keynote speech from its CEO Gorkem Elverici who gave an update about the Plant of the Future.
Already six of the top 10 largest glass manufacturers had agreed to be part of the collaborative initiative to advance the entire industry.
The Plant of the Future aims to bring digitalisation and sustainability to the forefront of glass manufacturing.
It was launched last October and already has made progress.
Three key challenge areas have been selected as initial areas of focus for the initiative: decarbonisation of glass furnaces, digital furnace control and management, and glass forming processing technologies.
To facilitate the vision, Mr Elverici said Şişecam had 60 furnaces in differentiated glass segments, 2200 engineers in glass manufacturing and technologies, three years of digital twin date records as well as 365 billion of production data which it was willing to share with collaborators.
In years to come more than 500 million of production data will be required he added.
Şişecam recently completed a transformation project to re-platform itself and its technological foundation in order to continue to generate such data.
His speech was followed by a panel discussion comprising Mr Elverici, Glass Service's Erik Muijsenberg, Celsian's Dr Johan van der Dennen and Prof Dr Oguzhan Aygoren, a Director at the Institute for Business Innovation.
In it Mr Muijsenberg said the Plant of the Future concept was a revolutionary idea for the industry.
Later in the morning, Prof Massimo Guglielmi was awarded the ICG Turner Award for his work as Chairman of Technical Committee 12.
TC-12 contributed directly to the fight against the Covid-19 virus with its work on glass vials which could keep contents of the vaccine stable.
