2018 GAS Conference in Murano Italia GREEN PANEL by InMurano
For nearly 1000 years, glass has been created and developed on the small Venetian Island of Murano. The traditions, the color recipes, the designs, and techniques have been passed on through the many generations of glassmakers.
BioGlass got it’s start when Julie Conway, its founder spent time in Murano from 2003-2006 working with the glass Maestri at the Abate Zanetti glass school. Between those years, the natural gas bill increased with a 60% delivery tax, and a double edged sword of the increase of Asian knock offs of glass, some of which are even being sold on Murano to tourists!
This has had a terribly negative effect on the glass economy and the protection of this rich heritage and culture of glass as we know it today.
Modern day glassmakers are threatened on so many fronts: cheap knock-offs is one of our major competitors, but also is the ever rising cost of fuel and the fewer and fewer spaces left open to host the expensive furnaces.
The latest difficulty is now how to make the recipes of metal and compounds needed to create the luscious colors in glass safely and up to environmental standards.
The small island of Murano has had hundreds of glass making houses each melting their own color batch to their unique specifications. Currently, color makers across the globe are having to invest in very expensive filtering systems to trap the contaminants and keep the process up to new environmental standards.
The GAS conference in Murano presented the very educated and astute panel Organized by InMurano
The Future of Glass Colour. Cristiano Ferro, Prof. Francesco Gonella, Dr. Sandro Hreglich,
Prof. Antonio Pires de Matos, Prof. Carlo Pantano, Prof. John Parker, Prof. Setsuhisa
Tanabe, Dr. Caterina Toso.
The crisis about to hit the glass community at large is the imminent ban of use of selenium and cadmium in color making. These esteemed panelists were presenting solutions in order to protect and evolve this threat to glass as we know it. Imagine no yellows or reds…. (!) This will completely change the glassmakers palette!
No answers were concluded yet, but solutions they will find! These experts are exploring the deep history of Italian glassmaking back in the centuries before selenium and cadmium were used to make reds and yellows, (no recipes have been written down to protect secrecy) to nano-technology of molecules to invent these colors in the future!!
WOW!
