Immagine: 

Italtecno was born in 1974, which means next year you’ll celebrate 50 years of pioneering research and development of technologies for surface treatment of aluminium and its alloys, for extrusion-die cleaning and recovery of its caustic soda, and for water purification treatments. How many advances in the field has your contribution helped make possible?

Ever since the early 20th century, when the first aluminium plane fuselage was produced, the use of this light metal has expanded, bringing benefits both in terms of energy saving and safety. Aluminium is a “circular” material par excellence, as it can be infinitely recycled. That’s why we’ve always been committed to researching and building plants to process this metal so very precious for our planet’s health. Moreover, we introduced environmentally sustainable features to our plants long before regulations made them mandatory. Like our equipment for waste water treatment, which, thanks to its full-recycle feature, avoids wasting and dumping millions of liters of water per day.

How is that?

Treatments needed before the anodizing and coating phases require tanks full of chemicals. Any water used for such treatments has to be constantly sanitized and dumped; our water treatment equipment ranges from basic chemical and physical purification to purification with full recycling of all water, leading to zero liquid discharge.

Today, with its experts and researchers and, most notably, its organization of the Aluminium Two Thousand biyearly world congress, Italtecno constitutes a reference point for all operators in the business. But how and when did the push to internationalization begin?

We expanded our market outside of Europe and in different sectors (aluminium for architectural, decorative, mechanical, industrial, automotive and aeronautical application) in the early 80’s. We landed in the States by introducing aluminium electrocolouring, barely known back then, and cold sealing, which we had patented and later sold to Lockheed to gain access to the whole of North America.

In 1985 we took part in an international mission to China set up by the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs. We were pioneers in this instance too: no one used to think about China as a business outlet for light industry, and aluminium was unknown in the middle empire. Still, we considered it worthwhile to squeeze ourselves through the breach Deng Xiaoping had open in 1980, when he launched his program of political reforms. The accompanying picture shows exactly how far China had opened by then: we see a nation in transition, yet still militarized, as evident from the uniformed men who had stepped into the negotiations for the (eventually successful) sale of three anodizing plants in Shenyang, Liaoning’s capital city.

But the most astonishing was actually the trip there from Beijing: for exactly one week, every single morning, all of us who took part in the mission would go to the airport, but to no avail. Accompanying us on this mission was Francesco Cossiga, then Minister of Internal Affairs and who would go on to become President of the Italian Republic in just six months. It feels like a different era altogether: now, after the Internet sped up our lives so much, who could resist a whole week just waiting in a hotel?

But we took it in our stride and used the opportunity to experience firsthand the computerisation of Beijing’s airport, which had been taken over by boxes and boxes of computers.

Over the years Italtecno has opened branches in Brazil, India and the Far East, as well as sales, distribution and tech support offices in twenty-five countries all over the world. It also recently acquired Glasschimica, a company offering a wide range of scientific equipments and lab materials…

Truth is, we were the one who founded Glasschimica in the 80’s. At first we had become representatives for the Carlo Erba firm in our area, then we figured we could create an entirely new company to handle this side of business – a side which promised ample market opportunities, considering that all kinds of industries have labs. And that’s how Glasschimica was born, though it was later sold to one of the associates, whose son kept it going until retirement. Then, maybe out of nostalgia for old times, having founded it, we bought it back to make it into a division of Italtecno, allowing us to offer the chance to get everything needed to put together a complete laboratory to our clients as well.

In the end, if we consider Italtecno’s next fifty years, we cannot neglect to mention our newly hired young graduates, who will ensure our future and who’ve had the lucky chance to listen to the most important developments of the aluminium world in the context of a world congress such as Aluminium Two Thousand.  Normal 0 14 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Speaking of which, just a reminder that all papers can be requested at info@interallpublications.it