Italtecno’s slogan is “the art of aluminium finishing”. It’s not by chance, as its technicians take a precious lesson from the artist’s job, always called to introduce one innovation after the other, following the direction the market is moving in and, sometimes, even anticipating its trends, always having to find “the way”.
“The way” is inherent to everything we do. Art and culture help us find it, because they always bring about new ideas. And in doing anything, we do start from ideas, but we also need to have them become operative, to find their way into a project, product or service. Still, there are infinite ways to do anything: it could be done in an effective way, allowing the ideas to fulfil their potential, or it could be done in a way that doesn’t affect the market, maybe because it isn’t the right time or it’s prohibitively expensive. It isn’t easy to find the right way, because reality is complex and the way we go about ideas is just as important as the ideas themselves. There are no right or wrong ones, all ideas can be great, but, if we go about them the wrong way, they remail sterile. I know many people who have genius ideas but who can’t see them through, maybe because they can’t make them practical or because the materials they use are too expensive. In our field, for example, we have to find the right materials, something valid and sturdy, and we have to make sure they’re processed safely and with minimal waste. Furthermore, the machines we build have to be aesthetically pleasing, with a look that attracts buyers, because, in mechanics too, it’s beauty that wins, not just functionality. Of course, it’s hard to find an industrial product that has no competition, unless you have one of those rare ideas from which proper inventions come from, but even those get copied rather fast. So, we have no choice left but to rack our brains to keep innovating, to find ways of always doing something more than other manufacturers; like artists did in the Renaissance, not so much competing among each other but rather in a constant process of emulation born from comparation.
Ever since its debut in 1974, Italtecno has focused on surface treatments for aluminium, offering whole or partial plants for use in the phases of anodising, coating, waste water treatment and extrusion die cleaning. In what ways do your innovative technologies take the environment’s needs into consideration?
It is essential to any technological project to keep a mindful approach to the environment’s safety. Our attention to the environment has focused particularly on sanitising waste waters from anodising and coating treatments, which require aluminium to be immersed in tanks filled with specific chemicals. After each round in these tanks, the treated components need to be washed, requiring a huge water amount and turnover, water which clearly needs to be sanitised before it’s dumped in the environment. Even assuming that producers keep up with regulations and that their waste water treatments work like clockwork, it still leads to an incredible waste of water. Just think: the average aluminium plant uses between 40.000 and 60.000 litres of water per hour, 24 hours a day, 300 days a year, considering holidays and days off. If we multiply this by the thousands of plants all over the world, we get some staggering numbers.
That’s why we put together results from our chemical and plant research divisions to give our clients tailor-made solutions for their waste water and primary water treatment. While following all applicable regulations and environmental standards, which change from one Country to another, we have provided countless water treatment plants all over the worlds in these last forty years: open-cycle chemical-physical plants, zero discharge close-circuit plants with evaporators, partial recycling plants, sludge treatments, final water treatments, deionisers, acid recovery equipment, phosphoric acid recovery systems, quartz filtering and osmosis equipment. Close-circuit zero discharge plants in particular allow for extraordinary business savings while also being an essential instrument for environmental conservation, since they keep reusing all of the same water but for a small percentage (about 5%) that gets lost along the process or becomes part of sludge waste, later disposed of by specialised companies; still, with a plant like this not a single drop is dispersed in the environment. Some wonder how long you can reuse the same water for: forever, just like water that rains down into aquifers to later flow out of springs, drinkable once again. We rarely think that what rains from the sky is the same dirty water that gets dumped into rivers and sea and which leaves all its pollutants and impurities on the ground when evaporating. As with all ingenious things, the first example of purification comes to us from nature herself. That’s why Leonardo da Vinci looked at the natural world for inspiration when trying to invent anything. Nature is the first teacher and that’s why artists, like Leonardo used to say, are competing with nature.
About the intersection of art, industry and nature, there’s an article in an issue of your magazine “Aluminium Extrusion and Finishing” about these beautiful aluminium outer walls decorating factories with artistic images…
They’re called Walls to communicate: a refined and sophisticated technology allows us to use perforated aluminium sheets to build images, logos, visual designs and various visual combinations that become vehicles to share messages, slogans or simply sensations. It’s a patented ventilated façade system, called Decorcoat®, which enables a reduction of the building’s energy consumption and consequently of CO2 emissions, as well as offering architects, designers and city planners an unlimited range of possibilities for projects of great impact. With these walls you can, for example, turn an old factory into an aesthetically pleasing building, especially if reproducing the surrounding landscape. The technology we use transmits an image to the machine, which then replicates said image by punching holes in the metal. It isn’t our technology though, we’re just promoting it because these walls can be made from aluminium and because it offers an interesting architectural solution.
We’re eager to form alliances and collaborations with other firms, because in these days no business institution can count itself as an island. It’s plain to see in districts, where every business takes care of a part of the processes that makes up the whole manufacturing line, almost to the point of making all involved businesses essential to each other.
Your inclination towards business alliances, towards exchange, towards “the way of the word” shows you’re coming from a place of openness and of not accepting to exist in vacuums.
What you’re saying can be summed up with one word: communication. Without communication there is no business. Even if you have a product that’s the world’s best, you still need communication to sell it. A dear departed friend used to tell me: “If someone has the most beautiful singing voice but performs inside a telephone booth, it’s the same as not having that beautiful voice at all.” Communicating means talking with others, letting others hear you voice. It’s the art of communication that promotes each business and makes them grow, which is why magazines and papers are so important. And art too is communication: an artist or writer uses their tools to communicate their feelings, their thoughts. Only if their inventions go beyond being ideas, if they give birth to intellectual creations, only then can they influence humanity. The same thing can be said about entrepreneurs, who need to communicate, to meet other entrepreneurs, to make alliances and deals, in order for their products to affect the economy, as well as the quality of life of cities, nations and the planet itself.
We at Italtecno consider communication to be so important that, in 1982, we founded Interall Publications, which doesn’t just publish aluminium-related books and magazines – like our quarterly “Aluminium Extrusion and Finishing”. It also created a unique, worldwide communication tool: the biennial “Aluminium Two Thousand World Congress” (whose 12th edition will be held in Bologna, Italy, at the Royal Hotel Carlton, from 19 to 23 September), with me as president, speeches from the highest aluminium experts on the planet and a great attendance turnout, despite the significant registration fee, thanks also to the artistic and cultural activities we offer on the side.