Announcer: Welcome to Business like 360 with Christy Kaye, where we get to know thought leaders and innovators, trends and impact in the world of business and we see firsthand how business and life have evolved.

Business Life 360 with Christy Kay is made possible by Promedica, a locally owned, nationally recognized, not for profit health care network that has a strong commitment to clinical excellence, providing safe, high quality patient care, and addressing social issues that impact health.

John B and Lillian E Neff, College of Business and Innovation at the University of Toledo Developing lifelong Leaders for the World of Business and by KeyBank, also by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Kristi K.: Welcome to Business Life.

360.

I'm your host, Christy Kaye.

I often say that in understanding innovation and where we're headed in business and industry, we must first understand from where we came.

And with that in mind and this episode, we're talking about the business of Glass.

It's an industry that we may take for granted in everyday life windows, drinking glasses, bottles, eyeglass lenses, windshields, mirrors are obvious usages.

So kick back, relax and come along with me.

This is Business life.

360 The Midwest glass industry has spawned incredible innovation, new technologies and corporations across the globe.

A case in point.

I'm here at First Solar, one of the nation's largest solar energy companies, a multibillion dollar manufacturer headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, with three operational global manufacture RNG sites.

I'm here to meet Mike Carlucci, the chief supply chain officer at First Solar.

Thanks so much for being with me.

Michael Koraleski: Thank you, Kristie.

Glad to be here.

Kristi K.: So here we are at one of your operational plants here.

And I want to hear a little bit more about what your products are and what you make here.

Michael Koraleski: Sure.

So, absolutely.

So we make solar panels, obviously, it's a glass on glass panel.

So we actually use two pieces of glass.

And in between that piece of glass, we put a semiconductor.

And our semiconductor is different than most everyone else in the industry, where we're use a thin film technology that is both responsibly and transparent supply chain Source.

Kristi K.: So, Mike, who are your biggest customers here at First Solar?

Michael Koraleski: So our biggest customers are actually utility players.

When you go past a large utility scale market, especially tied directly to the grid that year, we play very well in the market.

Kristi K.: So on this show of business like 360, we're talking about the glass industry and the impact that it's had.

So glass obviously is a key component to all of the products that you make here.

How so?

Michael Koraleski: So we wouldn't be here without glass.

We need glass for our technology specifically.

It's what we actually deposit our semiconductor on top of, and that's what gives us our 40 year warranty from the durability of the glass, the ability to source it in the Midwest, close to our frost factories and things like that.

Actually helps us with our growth strategy over the time.

There's really no better material for our technology from the substrate and the copper than glass.

Kristi K.: Now, First Solar has deep roots in Ohio, in the Midwest, and it continues to grow and innovate and develop new technologies.

So tell us about it.

Got the number $1.5 billion of investment that you have made in your manufacturing facilities and your plants.

So tell us where those are located.

Michael Koraleski: So that 1.5 billion is actually just since August of 22, and that's just in the US alone.

We have invested obviously in the US and really neat piece that we have done just across the street from where we're standing today is about a 270, $70 million investment in an R&D facility, which is the first of its kind in the US.

Additionally, we have manufacturing centers in active operationally in it in Vietnam, Malaysia, we have one coming up in India and we just broke ground on one outside of Decatur, Alabama.

Kristi K.: That is incredible, continuing to grow.

Michael Koraleski: We're very excited.

About it indeed.

Kristi K.: So this is a big sustainability play, really.

All the things that you're doing in terms of greenhouse emissions, the electric grid, some of the things that you're doing there.

Also, there's some renewable and recycled glass that you're using to make new solar panels.

Michael Koraleski: All of our glass that we use in the process, we are actually able to recycle that.

If it was scrapped, we can use it back at our float plants or we actually sell it into the glass container industry or glass bead industry for recycled use.

We're actually able to recycle about 90% of all of our material in our solar panel.

Kristi K.: That's incredible.

Michael Koraleski: We're pretty proud of that.

Kristi K.: And you think about what glass is down to really spawn new industry.

So there's another example the renewable, recyclable.

Michael Koraleski: Absolutely It's a it's a big piece of who we are and how we operate.

We believe that you can't bring solar by itself without having a sustainable circular economy aspect to taking into account.

Kristi K.: Well, and you talked earlier a little bit about the supply chain and how there is probably a radius of supply chain companies that you are working with near here.

Yeah.

So a lot of those also were Midwest roots.

Absolutely.

Michael Koraleski: Absolutely.

So you look at a few of them in the glass industry specifically, you know, NSG, we work initially with their Ottowa, Illinois facility, which is not too far away.

And our growth actually spawned an investment in a new float in the US not too far from here in Lucky Ohio that is fully dedicated to our to our expansion here.

And we're working with them on future growth of some of their existing flow to transform them from older technology into the new technology for the solar industry.

Kristi K.: And we talk about the cost of solar panels.

How has that been impacted over the last, let's say, decade or so.

Michael Koraleski: When when I look at the costs from when I started to where we're at today, it has dropped, you in insignificant orders of magnitude.

I remember when it used to be $1 of what was a key metric you know, to get below Kristi K.: So what does First Solar's technology roadmap look like as we go into the future?

Michael Koraleski: So our technology roadmap always looks bright and solar, right?

When I look at it and we we're going to continue to grow our core technology efficiency.

So the amount of light that actually transform into electricity, we continue to improve that.

We're going to look at different technologies such as tandem technology, where we're actually working with two different semiconductor films together.

And all of those instances, the glass will play a role in that as the core piece of as the core infrastructure for where we move forward.

Kristi K.: And speaking of glass as an industry, where do you see glass and the impact of glass on the global economy in the future?

Michael Koraleski: You know, when you when we look around, we're standing in front of glass day where glass is coming down our line today.

We have glass in our cars.

We have glass everywhere.

When you look at glass across the world, it's it's something that will continue to grow.

We're going to have to watch, you know, a lot of the infrastructure around the industry is is decades old.

We need to continue to look at how invest in that and change it to a an improved technology.

You know, whether it's through hydrogen sourcing or things like that, from fuel efficiencies to get better sustainability about that product as well.

Kristi K.: Okay.

So Mike, when you are on business, Life360 60, we do something called Quick Hits, which is also rapid fire questioning.

Are you ready for this?

I'm ready.

Okay.

This helps our viewers to get to know you a little bit better.

And you're running for solar, so we'd like them to get to know you better.

Here we go.

Okay.

What was your first job?

Michael Koraleski: My first job was actually working at a golf course, picking up the range balls.

Kristi K.: Nice.

First concert.

Michael Koraleski: Oh, man, I don't know.

It was a small group out of Cleveland called Odd Girl Out back in the late eighties.

Kristi K.: So where do you want to be in 20 years?

Michael Koraleski: In 20 years?

I would like to be in a river fishing, I think, is where I would like to be.

Fly with my wife.

Yes, fly fishing.

Kristi K.: Very nice.

The best part about working at First Solar?

Michael Koraleski: My Boss.

I think I think it overall is the people.

I think that people are really what makes it fun and the industry and the mission that we deliver on right.

It's great to be part of something that's driving sustainable, something that we can look better in the future with.

So I really like the mission and vision that we stick with.

Kristi K.: You Favorite city in the world.

Michael Koraleski: Toledo, Ohio.

Kristi K.: Love the answer.

And if you weren't working in this field, what career would you be in?

Michael Koraleski: A history teacher?

Kristi K.: Ha, Very nice.

Interesting.

Well, Mike Carlucci from First Solo, thanks so much for having us here today.

Michael Koraleski: Thanks, Kristi.

Appreciate the time.

Kristi K.: Here to talk about the history of the glass industry is our guest, Milton Ford Knight, also known as Tony, who was a CEO and also a glass historian who started the Glass Heritage Museum, a mobile platform to showcase the importance of glass early innovators and their impact on today's world.

Tony also is the great grandson of Edward Ford, an early glass pioneer, which I will just bet had something to do with his interest and depth of knowledge in the glass history that we're going to be talking about today.

So, Tony, welcome to Business Life, 360.

It's great to have you here.

Tony Knight: Thanks, Kristie.

Kristi K.: Well, we can't wait to talk to you about the history of glass.

So first of all, you have spent decades studying the roots of the glass industry, of the innovators and some of the icons.

So give us an understanding, if you would, as to some of those things that were happening.

Let's just say back and maybe the 17 or 1800s and what was going on in this particular region.

Tony Knight: Well, I think it's an interesting painting of the background of where Glass came from.

And you have to understand that at this particular point in time, travel wasn't very easy.

Travel wasn't you couldn't get to Ohio, you couldn't get to Toledo, Ohio.

And quite frankly, we end up the railroads work their way through into the Ohio River Valley.

Sometime in the 1860s or 1870s, the canal systems were an opportunity to grow commerce in this area as well.

And so all of a sudden we start in the 1870s and 1880s, having a lot of interest.

So it took a while, it took energy, it took the development of of gas resources, it took the energy of coal.

Anthracite coal was discovered in Pennsylvania as well.

So those are all things that had an impact on the growth.

Kristi K.: So in terms of the emergence, then in terms of natural resources, in addition to that, were there some other things that really made the region ripe for the summer?

Tony Knight: Well, I think what it transpired was that we found silica sand and natural gas.

Findlay was the Ohio, which was northwestern.

Ohio was the one of the early places.

The other key was really the discovery of salt under this, the city of Detroit and under Lake Huron, as well as even under Cleveland.

Those all helped in the process of making soda ash.

And so the ash was an important ingredient that was imported from Europe largely before that time.

Kristi K.: Tell us about some of those key people who made the glass industry what it is today and really planted those seeds early.

Tony Knight: And I think those those people, which would include Michael Owens, Kirk clearly, and Edward Drummond Leidy, who came out of the East Coast and came here to Toledo.

He was probably the first individual who came, came here and brought his glass company, Libbey Glass, to the Toledo market.

He was looking for the sand, He was looking for the deal on a natural gas, and he was and that was beneficial.

Edward Ford came shortly thereafter and and I mean, within a year or two after, after Edward Drummond Libbey came here and he came here for the same reason, but his family, his father, J.B Ford or Cat, was often referred to as Captain John B, came actually out of New Albany, Indiana, which is right near Saint Louis, moved to Pittsburgh, helped establish Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company.

And then he and his son sold their interests in Pittsburgh.

Plate Glass Edward came here, used the money from the sale and and JB went up and created a company called Michigan Alkali, which made soda ash.

Kristi K.: So from these icons, if you will, these pioneers, certain companies were formed.

And those companies I know were significant in terms of product development and then future contracts with Ford, with General Motors.

Tell us about some of those companies and the products that they really started to bring forward to the public and to industry in that day?

Tony Knight: Yeah, you have to you have to think about these time periods that include did a depression in 1895, a World War one, a huge recession.

And in in the twenties, which bankrupted nearly bankrupted General Motors.

And you look at these individuals and you say to yourself, how did all this how did all this happen here in in Toledo, Ohio?

Well, they survived.

They were they carried through Orange and Libby combined together to make not only the Owens bottle company, but also the Libby Owens Plate Glass Company.

And then in addition to that, you had Edward Drummond, Edwin Ford, excuse me, and Edward Ford effectively brought the glass company to Toledo.

But they all came into the Depression and all those things changed.

Owens Bottle Company ended up merging with the Illinois Glass Company in 1929.

Libby Owens Plate Glass Company merged with the Edward Ford Plate Glass Company to make Ellsworth.

What ultimately ends up happening is years later, you start to see the benefit, the outgrowth of those things.

Owens Corning fiberglass came out of the Owens Illinois group and Libby Owens Ford had the same thing.

And Johns Manville in the fiberglass business came out of Lowell of Perm.

Glass came with Norma HP, a number of others.

Kristi K.: So many, I'll call them initially tangential businesses, but now significant industries have really emerged from there.

Things like solar.

What are some of the other.

Tony Knight: Ones for solar would be a great is a great example.

Harold McMaster Norm Nitschke worked for Libyan's Ford and left and set up their own business out of out of perma glass.

They sold it to a little company called Guardian Industries up in Detroit, and Guardian went on to be a $600 million a year company.

Kristi K.: You really think about the impact that the glass industry has had on our lifestyles, and it truly has made not only our community, our state, our country, but the globe a better place.

And really much of that history was started in northwest Ohio.

Tony Knight: Yeah, it's amazing how how global the companies here were.

Kristi K.: Tony Knight, thank you so much for being here in business life.

368 Your knowledge and your history of the glass industry has really been.

Thank you.

Tony Knight: Kristi So as we discussed, when it comes to glass as an industry, it's not about naming rights or headlines.

It's about providing inspiration, motivation and about planting the seeds of innovation for the future.

And that innovation is just what we're exploring next.

So let's head out on location to see how the exciting glass business continues to change our world and our future.

And now I'm on location at MSD Pilkington at its new innovative Flow glass plant in Lucky Ohio to discuss the evolution in glass technology and industry.

And the study group is one of the world's largest manufacturers of glass and glazing products for the architectural, automotive and typical glass sectors.

In 2006, the NSG group acquired Tetley ten, renowned for the invention of the flow glass process, which revolutionized the world's glass industry.

So now let's go meet two men who know an incredible amount about glass innovation.

Guys, it's great to be here today next day.

Christine, thank you for coming.

It's an honor and a pleasure for us to have you here with us today.

Kristi K.: So today we're talking an awful lot about the glass industry and its transformation.

So what have you seen since the first day you started work today?

Why don't we talk about this plant and some of the products?

Steven Weidner: Many, many change.

It's almost a night and day transformation and the technology and the way glass is manufactured and the way glass is used in the way glass is fabricated.

So many, many changes over the 43 years I've been in the business.

Kristi K.: So we talk about that now, specifically when we look at some of the industrial pioneers and those who really started companies in the Midwest way back in the day in the 1800s, let's say, how has the the seeds that they have planted really impacted business today?

Steven Weidner: Well, our company started in 1918, but our DNA in the glass business really goes back over 200 years to a company founded in St Helens, England.

So our company has been in existence for over 200 years here in the United States since the 1890s.

So we've got a long history in glass.

And traditionally the products that we've made have been Windows, windows for either automotive applications or residences or specialty applications for transportation, commercial buildings and so on and so forth.

And what you're looking at today is a facility that we founded and started up in December of 2020.

And this is a brand new technology.

We've transformed what just used to be window glass into what we're going to talk about a flat, transparent wire.

So the technology is completely different, even though the form looks the same, the form factor and the technology is radically different than what we started with 100 or 200 years ago.

Kristi K.: Kyle, you're the business development manager for NASA.

Pilkington Talk to us about some of the transformation in the glass industry that you have seen and some of those that are the most significant.

Kyle Sword: Yeah, for sure.

Thanks.

Thanks again for coming today.

We're really happy to have you.

So our business here in Toledo started as a plate glass manufacturer.

We were one of the three key elements needed for skyscraper construction.

You needed air conditioning, you needed elevators, and you needed polished plate glass to be able to withstand wind blows at high temperature.

So we started off just being a transparent product that people look through.

And over the last 100 years here, now that product is starting to add functionality and needed to have a different additional demand.

So if you go into the grocery store, the freezer door doesn't frost up.

It's because there's a transparent coating that heats that glass up.

There's now glass that manages the heat ingress and the air conditioning load.

There's glass that's dynamic that switches and there's actually transparent glass or windows that generates power, you know, So it's like a transparent solar cell that's on the side of a building.

There's all sorts of these new technologies that are coming out that have all this different demand of products.

It's not just about the way it looks and that it's transparent.

It's actually a transformative component to a lot of high tech products that people just are not aware of, that we produce data.

Kristi K.: For sure.

Steven Weidner: Kristi, that technology was developed and cultivated incubated here in Toledo.

So the glass that you see behind us has a very thin film of metallic oxide, 100 times thinner than your hair.

But if you take your hair and you slice it 100 times, that's the thickness of the coatings that we put on it.

So they're transparent, but they conduct electricity.

And so I tell people, I tell our employees and I tell our customers we don't make glass.

We actually make a flat transparent wire that we can either push current into a device such as what Kyle was talking about with Electrochromic that allow glass to change from clear to dark to manage the amount of energy coming through or glare control or things like that.

Or we can pull current out of a device such as in photovoltaic panels.

So if you think the sun's energy is transmitted through our glass and absorbed by the semiconductor materials inside a portable peg panel where you need to harvest that energy out of the panel.

And our glass is the wire that pulls the current out of the device and creates that flow of electrons.

Kristi K.: So, Kyle, I know we talked a little bit before about some of the supply companies and First Solar being one of the companies in supply for their products and services.

What are some of the other companies that you supply and some of the products and some of the things that they're doing that are really impacting and really extending some of that reach?

Kyle Sword: So we still supply a lot into residential and commercial construction.

We supply First Solar, we supply a couple other dozen companies that do different types of photovoltaic.

So this can be from the regular solar cells that you see from the little tiny solar cells that are maybe out in your garden to the transparent window, solar cells to even these low power generation ones that run some of the signage and like grocery stores and stuff like that.

We supply a lot of companies that do electrochromic send different types of switchable products.

We supply to almost every company that supplies into the commercial refrigeration market hundreds and hundreds of these little small technologies that are starting off.

And again, as you said, we're not this, you know, dirty glass manufacturer.

You're shoveling dirt every day.

We're essentially an electronics component manufacturer at a large scale that supplies a number of different technology companies.

It's really exciting to be a part of that sort of growth and that we have a technology that really makes a bigger impact.

Kristi K.: So, Steve, tell us, how has Glass really changed our world?

Steven Weidner: Well, we use it hundreds of times every day, if not thousands of times.

You look through windows, you use glass to cook on your countertop or on the oven door, the electrochromic windows that they go from clear to dark, all the windows in your car, plane trains, all the transportation.

So it's a very ubiquitous material that's used in a very wide and broad range of different applications.

Kristi K.: And then, Kyle, last question for you, if you could write a personified legacy for Glass, what would it say.

Kyle Sword: Personified Legacy for Glass?

That's a great question.

I think for me is this would be the Thomas Edison of products.

This is something that has a complete transformative ability to change the industry, to change and create new industries, to change people's lives.

And it's one that people just take for granted because it's used in so many different places.

Kristi K.: Kyle, Steve, thank you so much for being on Business Life 360.

I can't think of two better people to talk to us about the transformation of glass.

Steven Weidner: Thank you.

Kristi K.: Yes.

Steven Weidner: Thank you.

I appreciate you coming today.

Kristi K.: Thank you.

According to the National Glass Association, president and CEO Nicole Harris, Glass is adaptable, sustainable, energy efficient, strong, beautiful and safe.

In a word, essential and how right she was and how far the glass business has come, as exemplified by A.T. Pilkington and First Solar.

And that's a wrap on this episode of Business Life 360.

Glad you joined us to learn more about the exciting business and innovation occurring here in our region and beyond.

I'm Kristi K. and I'll see you on the next business live 360.

Announcer: Connect with Kristie Kay on LinkedIn at Kristie Kay Hoffman.

And here the Business Life 360 conversation on FM 91 on Thursday mornings to watch previous episodes and more.

Visit our website at GTI DOT Ogbe 360 and join Kristy for her new podcast.

Business Life After Hours Business Life 360 with Christy Kay is made possible by Promedica, a locally owned, nationally recognized, not for profit health care network that has a strong commitment to clinical excellence, providing safe, high quality patient care and addressing social issues that impact health.

John B and Lillian E Neff, College of Business and Innovation at the University of Toledo.

Developing lifelong Leaders for the World of Business and by KeyBank, also by viewers like you.

Thank you.