Leeds-based Workoola founded by Rana Rihan in 2021 with seed funding and support from WeDo Business Services started as a provider of temporary, fixed-term and permanent staff for sectors including manufacturing, food production and processing around Yorkshire. The company developed close ties to the glass manufacturing industry and has branched out into providing quality control for jars and bottles used for food and drink items. This operation has 30 staff based at a dedicated 11,500ft2 warehouse in Stourton, Leeds.

Ms Rihan is now seeking a larger site in the Leeds area totalling around 30,000 sq ft, to bring Workoola under one roof, with plans to recruit around 100 people over the next 12 months for a new glass decoration division.

Glass for Europe attended the first stakeholder workshop on the European Commission SUNRISE project funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. The aims are to increase the collection and treatment of laminated glass, improve separation of the polymer interlayer, which is today most often considered a waste and ends in incineration or landfilling, and therefore optimising the recyclability.

Foamit Group ensures that waste glass from business and consumer activities is efficiently and safely recycled. In addition to Uusioaines Oy in Finland, the Group also includes Hasopor AB in Sweden and Glasopor AS in Norway.

Every year, Uusioaines receives around 80,000 tonnes of recycled glass, 70% of Finland’s collected cullet. The company uses it to produce raw material for the glass industry and foam glass aggregate for infrastructure and building construction. The Silver Rating recognition awarded to Uusioaines in the EcoVadis Sustainability and Social Responsibility Assessment means that the company is among the top 25% of companies assessed

Corning and SGD Pharma have formed a joint venture that includes the opening of a new glass tubing facility to expand pharmaceutical manufacturing in India and allows SGD Pharma to adopt Corning’s Velocity Vial technology platform. Together, the two companies will help drugmakers respond to increasingly complex capacity and quality issues while meeting global demand for critical medicines.

The Glass Futures £54 million Global Centre of Excellence in St Helens has officially opened. It will soon be home to a unique experimental furnace and other technologies that pioneer ways of making carbon neutral glass that will help the global glass industry to create greener, cleaner products.

Speaking at the opening on 6 June, Richard Katz, CEO of Glass Futures said: “I don’t let go in a hurry and a decade after the idea of Glass Futures was first conceived that dream has come to fruition. Removing carbon emissions from global manufacturing is our world’s greatest challenge, and we need to change how we do things.

With the opening of Germany's first photovoltaic recycling site, Reiling can now deal with the expected masses of end-of-life modules. The focus of the recycling centre in Münster is: collection, testing for reuse and recycling of silicon-based PV modules. The site has a new testing line and a specially developed plant with regard to the recycling on an industrial scale. By bundling the testing and recycling activities together, process flows are optimised and capacity significantly increased.

Mirox 4Green+ is the latest version of AGC’s premium lead-free mirror featuring a water-based protective coating and even lower emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This fully opaque product remains the ideal solution for backlit applications.

Featuring a unique coating of water-based paint, not only does Mirox 4Green+ use 20% less paint compared to a standard mirror, but the paint itself contains less than 10% organic solvents and the VOC emissions are 80% lower than a standard mirror.

Vetropack Group has chosen Acmon Systems as their trusted manufacturing solution partner for the renovation of the batch house. This project marks the first step in upgrading a flint glass production line at the company's Straža glass factory in Croatia and is expected to be in full operation by November 2024.

Şişecam has signed a letter of intent to become an investor in ICRON, a Turkish technology company that provides optimisation platform services to numerous sectors for their strategic and operational decision-making needs. The company’s ongoing discussions on its initial investment in the field of technology development reflect an eagerness and appetite for innovative, technological, digital and promising technology companies and projects.