Encirc is investing more than £700,000 over three years in workforce development at its Derrylin glass plant in County Fermanagh, with training covering low carbon technologies, alternative fuels, engineering, digital skills, data and artificial intelligence. Invest Northern Ireland has offered £157,200 towards the programme.
The investment is intended to prepare employees for changes in glass production as Encirc works towards its stated ambition of producing glass without generating carbon emissions from 2030. The company is part of the Vidrala group and produces approximately three billion glass containers a year across its operations, supplying major food and beverage brands.
A central element of the plan is a new One Horizon programme focused on continuous professional development and leadership capability. Alongside that programme, employees will undertake specialist engineering training linked to lower carbon manufacturing and alternative fuels, digital and data training, AI awareness and broader professional development. The package builds on a previous skills programme supported by Invest NI between 2023 and 2026.
Glass manufacturing makes the connection between skills and decarbonisation unusually direct. Furnaces operate continuously at very high temperatures, and changes to fuel, combustion, raw material mix or process control can affect melting behaviour, product quality, furnace life and energy consumption. New equipment cannot therefore be treated as a standalone capital purchase; operators and engineers need to understand how it changes a process that cannot simply be stopped whenever a setting requires adjustment.
Encirc describes a production sequence in which raw materials including silica sand, soda ash, limestone and recycled cullet are batched before entering furnaces operating at around 1,565°C. Molten glass then moves through forming, annealing, automated inspection, palletising and warehousing. Digital control and production data already sit across several of those stages, giving training in data and AI a practical route into process optimisation rather than leaving it as a separate corporate technology programme.
Alternative fuels add another layer of complexity. Decarbonising high temperature process heat is more difficult than replacing a conventional building boiler because fuel characteristics can influence flame behaviour, heat transfer, emissions and furnace operation. Any transition has to protect glass quality and production continuity while new fuel systems and control strategies are introduced.
Training engineers and operators before those changes become routine production requirements reduces the risk of technology arriving ahead of the skills needed to use it. The same applies to maintenance and fault finding, where unfamiliar fuels or controls can extend downtime if production teams depend on external specialists for every intervention. Internal capability becomes part of the investment case for the equipment itself.
The programme also includes leadership development, which is relevant to a plant undergoing long term process change. Energy, engineering, production, maintenance and quality teams have to work across the same projects while the existing process continues to meet customer schedules. Supervisors and managers therefore need enough technical understanding to balance production output, training time, maintenance access and commissioning work without treating decarbonisation as an isolated sustainability function.
Invest NI’s contribution covers only part of the programme, leaving Encirc to fund the majority of the £700,000 investment itself. The public support is intended to accelerate training rather than replace the manufacturer’s own spending, placing the programme inside the operating strategy for Derrylin instead of making it dependent on grant funding alone.
The skills investment also sits alongside other automation and infrastructure projects across Encirc’s UK operations. At Elton in Cheshire, the company has proposed a £98 million automated warehouse linked directly to glass production, using high bay cranes, conveyors and control systems to handle finished product. Derrylin is a separate programme, but both developments increase the amount of technical capability required around equipment, controls and maintenance.
Derrylin was Encirc’s first container glass plant, opening in 1998, and remains an important part of its UK manufacturing base. The site therefore combines experienced glassmaking knowledge with the need to introduce new fuels, digital tools and process technologies. Capturing and transferring that experience becomes more important as experienced engineers and operators move roles or retire, particularly where plant behaviour is not fully represented in a manual or control screen.
The immediate output from the investment will be training rather than additional tonnes of glass, so the return will be less visible than a new furnace or production line. Its value will show up in whether Derrylin can commission new technology, maintain process stability and develop enough technical depth to operate lower carbon equipment without permanent dependence on outside expertise. For a continuous process plant changing how heat, data and automation are used, that capability is part of the manufacturing infrastructure itself.
