Glass container industry

Marketing

Glass container manufacture in the developed world is a mature market business. Annual growth in total industry sales generally follows population growth. Glass container manufacture is also a geographical business; the product is heavy and large in volume, and the major raw materials (sand, soda ash and limestone) are generally readily available, therefore production facilities need to be located close to their markets. A typical glass furnace holds hundreds of tonnes of molten glass, and so it is simply not practical to shut it down every night, or in fact in any period short of a month. Factories therefore run 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

This means that there is little opportunity to either increase or decrease production rates by more than a few percent. New furnaces and forming machines cost tens of millions of dollars and require at least 18 months of planning. Given this fact, and the fact that there are usually more products than machine lines means that products are sold from stock.

The marketing/production challenge is therefore to be able to predict demand both in the short 4-12 week term and over the 24-48 month long term. Factories are generally sized to service the requirements of a city; in developed countries there is usually a factory per 1-2 million people. A typical factory will produce 1-3 million containers a day. Despite it’s positioning as a mature market product, glass does enjoy a high level of consumer acceptance and is perceived as a “premium� quality packaging format.

Modern glass container factories

Modern glass container factories are broadly divided into three parts: the batch house, the hot end and the cold end. The batch house is concerned with raw materials. In the hot end we find the furnaces, machines that make the containers (forming machines) and annealing ovens. In the cold end there are the inspection and packaging equipment.

Batch house

The batch house holds the raw materials for creating glass, primarily sand, soda ash and limestone (as well as numerous others). These materials are received (typically by truck or rail transport) and elevated into storage silos. From the silos they are accurately weighed out into a batch of several tonnes. The batch is mixed and sent to silos over the furnace.

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