Foodville~Where the Glass Goes. A visit to the OI Glass Factory in Kalama, WA. 2/19/26

Glass is an ancient and very modern material for food storage. Not too long ago most everything was stored in glass, even bleach came in glass. Nowadays, many foods are sold and stored in plastic or cardboard, Plastic has its benefits: it's lightweight, doesn't break and is cheaper than glass.  Glass however is, unlike plastic, infinitely recyclable and wonderfully sustainable. Here in Vancouver, the bottle you drink from at the beginning of the month and then put into your recycle bin will likely be crushed, reshaped, remolded, and re-formed into a lovely wine bottle before the end of the month. 

Join us on this fun audio tour the OI glass factory, where they produce millions and millions of bottles each month out of Vancouver's post-consumer glass.  Dominic Hartmann, the plant engineer, takes us all the way from the 200' batching silo down to the warehouse where towers of pristine, green-colored wine bottles await their journey to the next assignment.

Here are a few vocabulary words for you before we go into the plant.

Constituents: ingredients. In this case, soda ash, silica and limestone and cullet.

Cullet: glass crushed into roughly 1" pieces.

Flint: clear glass

Dead Leaf Yellow: the color of a wine bottle.

Batching silo: Where all of the ingredients are weighed mixed together.

Glass gob: Molten glass gobs are cut by a perfectly-timed blade to ensure each gob is of equal weight before it goes into the forming machine. The weight of a gob is important to the formation process for each glass container being made. The molded glass is created by gravity feeding gobs of molten glass into a forming machine, where pressure forms the neck and basic shape of the bottle. 

Parison: Once the neck finish and the general glass bottle shape has been achieved, the form is known as a parison.

Bottle Finish: The part that mates with the cap, lid or cork.

As always thanks for joining us in Foodville.  Ready your earplugs, safety helmet and safety vest. Here we go!