Sunday, December 8, 2024

Glass Futures Appoints Justin Kelly as New CEO

Justin is a Chartered Engineer with a BEng (Hons) in Computers, Management and Electronics. He began his career at Siemens where he held several roles over nearly three decades culminating in his appointment to the Siemens Executive Management Board in 2017.

Committed to driving innovation, Justin was the founding CEO of the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Centre in Greater Manchester to benefit both the economy and environment. In 2023 he became Non-Exec Chair of Sustainable Ventures North, an organisation dedicated to supporting sustainability-focused start-ups across the country.

Richard Katz, the first Glass Futures employee in January 2020, has been appointed President and will continue to work closely with the new Government to help them understand how Glass Futures’ research, development and innovation enables growth, particularly with reference to identifying what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t work for industrial decarbonisation in the fight against climate change.

Glass Futures was a concept developed some 10 years ago by Richard together with Dave Dalton, CEO of The British Glass Manufacturers’ Confederation, the representative body for the UK glass industry, as an independent not-for-profit organisation to enable the glass industry to have access to an industrial scale experimental pilot plant.

The facility has been designed and built by the industry to allow practical experimentation with alternative low carbon sustainable energy sources to replace high carbon natural gas to decarbonise glass manufacture toward a sustainable future.

Funding in the order of £75 million has been provided by National, Regional and Local Government together with the industry to build Glass Futures’ 165,000 sq.ft Global Centre of Excellence in St Helens on Merseyside, the home of Pilkington’s revolutionary Float Glass development.

Aston Fuller, General Manager at Glass Futures said “Having been the second employee at Glass Futures, I’m extremely proud to see the exponential growth of the organisation in such a short period of time. These important changes will support our growth and impact with our ever-growing diverse membership across the global glass supply chain sharing our collaborative ethos, to our own team who’ve developed and grown our vision”

“I look forward to continuing to support our members on this journey through an ever changing world of sustainability and resource efficiency technologies alongside Justin and Richard in the coming years”

This next phase of Glass Futures continues with new appointments to the Board of Directors, including Mike Houghton, Chief Commercial Officer of Process Industries Software at Siemens as Chair and José Miguel Ivorra, Vice President of Global Business Development at Guardian Industries in place of Dr Richard Hulme whose long-term secondment is drawing to a close.

They are welcomed by current Board members including newly established Deputy Chair, Adrian Curry, Executive Director and Chief Decarbonisation Officer at EET Fuels, Dr Ludovic Valette, Vice President of Technology and Engineering at O-I Glass, Inc. USA, Dave Dalton, CEO of The British Glass Manufacturers’ Confederation, Professor Anthony Hollander, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Liverpool, and Sean Murphy, Managing Director of Encirc.

Mike Houghton said “On behalf of the Board we would like to thank Richard Katz for his valuable contributions over the last 10+ years as Chief Executive, turning a vision into reality. Also great thanks to Guardian Glass’ Dr Richard Hulme who was instrumental in ensuring Glass Futures’ technical strategy reflected our member’s needs.”

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our news site - please take a moment to read this important message:

As you know, our aim is to bring you, the reader, an editorially led news site and magazine but journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them.

With the Covid-19 pandemichaving a major impact on our industry as a whole, the advertising revenues we normally receive, which helps us cover the cost of our journalists and this website, have been drastically affected.

As such we need your help. If you can support our news sites/magazines with either a small donation of even £1, or a subscription to our magazine, which costs just £31.50 per year, (inc p&P and mailed direct to your door) your generosity will help us weather the storm and continue in our quest to deliver quality journalism.

As a subscriber, you will have unlimited access to our web site and magazine. You'll also be offered VIP invitations to our events, preferential rates to all our awards and get access to exclusive newsletters and content.

Just click here to subscribe and in the meantime may I wish you the very best.








Latest news

Related news