• The owner of glass manufacturer Pilkington, Nippon Sheet Glass, has announced that it will close one of its three UK production lines in an effort to cut costs. The job cuts are the second major headcount reduction in two years: In March 2010, the firm cut 6,700 jobs in the wake of the global financial crisis.
• According to reports, approximately 500 tons of molten glass was spilled in an incident on 30th January 2012 at Guardian Industries’ glass manufacturing plant in De Witt, Iowa, US. The glass leak happened during routine maintenance and six fire departments spent approximately five hours pouring cold water on the spill.
• Zimbabwe’s sole glass manufacturer, Zimglass, is set to resume operations in April 2012 after the company secured funding to refurbish its furnaces.
• AGC Glass Company North America has announced that it plans to restart float G1, an idled production line at its Tennessee plant, USA and re-instate 100 jobs once the line becomes operational. The company shut down the production line in 2008 and laid-off approximately 250 people at the time.
• Seeing the promising prospects for container glass, Taiwan Glass Group, Taiwan’s largest glass maker, plans to expand production capacity at its plant in Hsinchu County, northern Taiwan by integrating two old production lines and adding a new one.
• Magnezit Group has acquired Panteleymonovka Refractory Plant (town Gorlovka), one of the biggest enterprises in Ukraine for production of magnesia refractories.
Editor’s note: We welcome Italy-based P. Carlo Ratto to our team of bloggers. Ratto is a former council member at GLG and consultant at RHI AG Glass Division – Monofrax & Refel plants and is business development manager, Fused Cast at Vesuvius Group (Monofrax). For more information, readers are urged to consider joining some of the ceramic-related Linked In groups, such as the Ceramic Engineers’ Group and the Friends of Refractories Group.