Making industrial glass, for use in windows and computer screens, has long been energy-intensive, but the rising cost of fuel is now an incentive to change.

ESSAY G. PASCAL ZACHARY

With higher energy prices seemingly here to stay, clever people are devising ways to reduce the resources and energy consumed in making a wide range of everyday essentials.
“To stretch our scarce resources, we absolutely do need to reinvent many of the production processes we are using today,” says Gwen Ruta, vice president for corporate partnerships at the Environmental Defense Fund.
But the challenges are enormous. Consider industrial glass, used to make windows in houses and cars, containers for liquids, screens for computers and cellphones, and hybrid products like fiberglass or fiber optics.
Glassmaking is based on old, stable technologies that require lots of materials and energy. The basic furnace, which melts sand into glass at extremely high temperatures, hasn’t undergone a fundamental change since the 1850s. Furnace designers have long contented themselves with small improvements, such as using pure oxygen to improve energy efficiency.
“We’re making glass essentially the same way as the ancient Romans,” says Ian Kemsley, an inventor in Portland, Oregon. “There’s tremendous waste, and a huge amount of money to be made by innovating.”
Mr. Kemsley has created a radical new design for melting sand into glass, based on the same technology that creates heat in microwave ovens. Because his approach relies on electricity, which is more expensive than the natural gas now used by glassmakers, skeptics say he will not be able to adapt his design to handle the enormous volumes of glass churned out by industrial companies.
Those high volumes exert a conservative force on an American industry that, while technologically avant-garde 100 years ago, is today heavily concentrated in several older companies in Ohio, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.
“These companies have not been entrepreneurial; they haven’t been thinking outside of the box,” says Michael Greenman, executive director of the Glass Manufacturing Industry Council, a trade group based in Westerville, Ohio, that represents the major players in the United States.
Mr. Greenman sees a new willingness to innovate among glassmakers who, until recently, usually shunned technological advances because savings in materials and energy didn’t justify the costs of introducing new designs and processes.
“Many innovations were, frankly, thwarted by cost,” says C. Philip Ross, a consultant in Laguna Niguel, California, who has studied technological options for the industry. “There’s a lot of upside in revisiting old, discarded ideas.”
Glassmakers are searching for both small and large advances on three fronts: designing more efficient furnaces; creating much stronger glass; and using heat better.
While small improvements in furnaces can help, a radical advance is needed. “Believe me, people have been trying for a long time, but it is so challenging,” says David Rue, a furnace designer at the Gas Technology Institute in Chicago. “A better one has to do everything we do now and then some new things.”
Mr. Rue has designed an experimental furnace that melts sand into glass in 3 hours instead of the typical 24. While the new furnace works, it yields smaller batches of glass and leaves too many bubbles, an outcome that Mr. Rue is trying to correct.
Making glass stronger is perhaps the most difficult problem, and potentially the most astonishing advance. Everyday glass is less than 1 percent of its theoretical strength. Stronger glass would be lighter, require less material and be cheaper to transport - and would mean fewer broken wine glasses at dinner parties. Lighter glass could save more energy than any other single innovation.
But there is a catch: Because the basic science of glass has been relatively neglected for decades, “we are just beginning to get a hold on the strength issue,” Mr. Greenman says.
Probably the quickest gains will come from better “heat recovery” in manufacturing. Heat is lost at many points and, until recently, glassmakers didn’t have much incentive to plug the leaks even though they knew how. Now they do.
“Heat recovery is so critical,” says Patrick Jackson, energy manager at Corning Inc., a leading glassmaker. “It is a game changer.”