Any visitors invited to tour the USD 140 million Owens-Illinois Inc. bottle plant in Windsor, Colorado are probably best advised to leave their cameras at home: the company is not keen on photos of th…
Any visitors invited to tour the USD 140 million Owens-Illinois Inc. bottle plant in Windsor, Colorado are probably best advised to leave their cameras at home: the company is not keen on photos of the technology installed at what one of its executives has called “the most advanced and high-tech plant in the country”. Finished in 2005, it is the first such bottle plant in the USA in 25 years. The facility feeds more than 1 billion bottles a year to the nation“s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch Inc. The maker of Budweiser encouraged O-I to locate the plant near its big brewery in Fort Collins. Inside the O-I plant, five robotic vehicles use lasers to navigate while they transport stacks of freshly made amber bottles to the warehouse while two vast 2,500-degree furnaces melt 800 tons of crushed recycled glass, sand, soda ash and other raw materials daily. Such technology has accelerated the process. When plant manager Dwayne Wendler joined O-I more than three decades ago in Portland, Oregon, production of “100 to 150 bottles a minute was fast”, he said. Today, the rate is more than 600 bottles a minute for each machine that forms the glass. Each day, fork-lift operators load the bottles into dozens of tractor-trailer trucks that travel 18 miles to the Anheuser-Busch brewery. O-I, the world“s No. 1 maker of glass containers, has a steady customer for its three styles of bottles while Anheuser-Busch gets a steady supplier for bottling its 20-plus beers. The 93,000-square-meter Fort Collins brewery, which uses cans and bottles, relies on the O-I plant for up to 95% of its bottle needs. “It“s not unique but not typical, either”, Glenn Wilson, senior plant manager of the Anheuser-Busch brewery, says of the relationship between the two facilities. O-I has 19 glass plants across the United States. One other is near an Anheuser-Busch brewery, in Toano, Virginia. Anheuser-Busch helped attract O-I to Windsor by highlighting the proximity to the brewery and the availability of a rail line to bring in raw materials. At the time, the brewer was relying on bottles made more than 600 miles away, in Oklahoma and Minnesota. “We entered into a long-term agreement with (O-I), which encouraged them to build the facility”, Mr. Wilson says. The two companies agreed on long-term pricing, and the brewer agreed to buy a certain volume. The relationship means that employees from both companies speak frequently by phone to go over the logistics of integrating the bottle operations and the beer-making and avoid hold-ups. Production of one style of bottle, for example, may need to be increased to accommodate a rise in output of a particular beer. “If there“s a change in the packaging schedule, they call”, says Mr. Wendler. O-I“s quality assurance rep visits the brewery each week to make sure the bottles are up to standard for the customer. To get to know each others“ operations, the O-I employees got a tour of the brewery. Anheuser-Busch employees got a similar look at the bottle plant. “It really helps us understand one another“s business”, says Anheuser-Busch“s Wilson. The bottle plant is Windsor“s fourth-largest employer. More than 4,000 people applied for jobs at the plant, which employs 210. Entry-level jobs pay USD 10 to USD 20 an hour. Workers involved in maintenance and forming the bottles earn in the mid-USD 20-an-hour range. “It“s very much an economic benefit to the community”, says Larry Burkhardt, CEO of the Upstate Colorado Economic Development. The plant“s first furnace was fired up in August 2005. That followed a tough time for the glass bottle business. According to data supplied by O-I, US industry shipments of glass bottles are about 35 billion a year, down from 47 billion in 1980. “Part of our strategy across the board is to help our customers go from glass to plastic and metal containers”, says Scott McCarty, spokesman for Ball Corp., North America“s largest maker of metal beverage cans. Owens-Illinois is responding with technology, as the Windsor plant demonstrates. “We“re putting out more product with less people”, Dwayne Wendler says.