Fabrice Rivet,
Environment, Health and Safety Director, FEVE

Securing our Industry’s Future: Towards Climate-Neutral Container Glass

The Furnace for the Future (F4F) project will develop a break-through technology to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions from container glass furnaces. Container glass production is an energy intensive industry, largely dependent on fossil fuels to provide energy for the chemical glass forming reactions and to melt the glass. Over the past decades a lot of improvements have been implemented to make the conventional technologies more energy efficient and less polluting. However, the conventional furnace technology is approaching the thermodynamic efficiency limits of the glass melting process.

F4F proposes a breakthrough allowing the industry to become significantly more energy efficient and drastically reduce the GHG emissions. A large-scale industrial hybrid oxyfuel furnace will be demonstrated, running on 80% renewable electricity, thereby reducing the currently used fossil fuel energy sources. The F4F project is technically and financially supported by 19 container glass companies who all signed a binding agreement and who together represent about 98% of the production covered by FEVE (the European Container Glass Federation).


Biography

Since January 2009, Fabrice is Environment, Health and Safety Director at the European Container Glass Federation (FEVE).

FEVE is the Federation of European manufacturers of glass containers and machine-made glass tableware. Its members produce over 20 million tonnes of glass per year. It is an international not-for-profit association, which currently numbers over 60 company members and 22 corporate groups across the European Union, Switzerland and Turkey.

Fabrice has launched and has been involved since the beginning in the FEVE Innovation WG, which has been looking for decarbonization solutions for the container glass industry and has identified the hybrid “Furnace for the Future” technology as the most promising one. He also manages the legal working group working on the different contracts between the participants.

He is very active on climate policy, and represents the whole glass industry in the Commission Expert Group on Climate Change and also chairs the Environment Committee of Glass Alliance Europe, the European Alliance of Glass Industries which regroup all the glass industries to work on common issues. It is composed of 19 national glass associations and of the main sectors of the glass industries: container glass, flat glass, special glass, domestic glass and continuous filament glass fibres..

He worked previously at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, then for the Belgian Glass Association.

He has 22 years experience in environmental sciences, support to industry, European Affairs and lobbying. He holds a masters degree in physics from the ULB, and is a qualified civil engineer. He also holds a masters degree in environmental sciences and training in management from Mercer University in the USA.