How it's Made: Wine Bottles

Last week I felt like I was on an episode of How It's Made.  Two coworkers and I went to Tracy, California to a glass plant to better understand that side of packaging.  Safety first!  Hard hat, eye and ear protection and a sweet vest.  Susan (Production Coordination) and I were very excited to be there.

The first thing you notice is the heat.  There are 4 giant furnaces working all day every day to melt the components to make glass.  It may look like this picture has a filter, but this is pretty close to the colors in the plant.  It's upwards of 90F in there, they said sometimes in the summer for a few days it has gotten up to 135F.  They have to take frequent breaks to combat heat exhaustion.

They let us go up to look into the furnace.  You can see the tiny round yellow hole in the picture.  It's what it must be like to look at the surface of the sun, undulating waves of molten glass lava.  You can't look at it directly, they gave us a filter to look through.  When I got up there it was so hot I think I singed my nose hairs.  For about 2 seconds I felt like the air was taken out of my lungs and then I felt a strong tingling sensation in my nose like severe allergies.  Totally worth it.  

This part is the mixing chamber.  I think.  It was so loud and very difficult to hear the explanations sometimes.  Anyway, some sort of mixing happens here.

This picture did not turn out well.  But what I was trying to illustrate (besides my stylish footware - they made me wear giant man shoes because my shoes were not appropriate) was how everywhere you walked the floor was covered with shards of glass.  There is just too much to ever clean up, so no one does.

The furnaces give off the most heat, but the freshly molded bottles (like the ones here) give off a lot of heat as they travel through the factory. 

 In this picture he is taking two bottles from the line that touched and were fused together.  He picks them up and sends them to be re melted and formed again.  In the video you see him demonstrating how malleable the molten glass is at this stage.

This machine preforms the QC by using lasers to examine the bottles for any defects.  They spin around and a computer searches for any bubbles, blisters, chips, cracks, stones, glass thickness and roundness.

Here is a conveyor of glass that has been approved and is on it's way to be packaged in cartons and pallets.

Between the walls is cullet.  Cullet is what they call recycled glass.  It has to be ground up before it can go back to the furnace to be melted and made into new glass.

I was so excited I got to take pictures this time.  Last year's visit to a different glass plant was mostly pictures of my view from the plane, what I had for lunch and an airport picture of me with Seattle swag for proof.

I still have more Portugal pictures to write about, but this was a nice break.

-L