The phantasmic Gerresheim experience
Where automation re-creates the glassblower's art
Manufacture of glass and its
fashioning into bottles is an
example of near-miraculous
human ingenuity.
The glass blower, with his
distended cheeks and superb
breath control that takes years to
develop, is one of industry's most
highly skilled craftsmen.
But his art would be too slow to
keep pace with today's commer
cial demands. The endless require
ments of beverage and other
manufacturers has boosted the
need for bottles and all kinds of
glass containers to unprecedented
proportions - a vast market that
has caused a revolution in
production methods.
Perhaps even more highly
developed than the craft of the
glass blower himself is the skill that
man has applied to mass
production methods, in which the
blowing and moulding of molten
glass into bottles are reduced to a
matter of seconds - a brief,
intensely automated phase of a
factory process that sees tons of
raw materials converted into
millions of bottles a day.
CONTACT recently observed this
fascinating and dramatic spectacle
at the works of Gerresheimer Glas
at Gerresheim, near Diisseldorf,
West Germany, a major bottle
supplier to Heineken.
Gerresheimer Glas was founded more
than a century ago. Its first bottle was
blown in 1864. For more than 60 years the
same technique was used, until in the early
years of this century the first automatic
machinery was installed.
Today the Gerresheimer works at Diissel
dorf is in terms of acreage the biggest glass
factory in the world and one of a family of
13 Gerresheimer plants in various parts of
Germany, all forming part of the
American Owens group of Illinois, Ohio.
Of its sister facilities, another six are
engaged in glass manufacture, three are in
the plastics business, two make cartons
and one produces aluminium cans.
The Owens group has a turnover of
US 3 billion and the Gerresheimer Glas
operation, representing about one third of
Owen's international activities, is in
scale. The Diisseldorf organisation has a
total turnover of some DM 780 million
and a payroll of 7,750 employees. These
include a shop force which works four to
five daily shifts to turn out annually 3
billion glass bottles and containers (for
cosmetics, jams, pickles), representing
about 900,000 tons of glass. It also
produces sheet glass at fhe rate of 12,000
square metres a day - enough to cover a
football pitch.
A 1,000,000,000 bottles
Heineken's relationship with the German
glass giant dates from 1946. From that
year until the start of the '50s bottle
shipments to Amsterdam were of relative
ly low volume and consisted mainly of
66 cl bottles. But over the past quarter
century the flow of bottle supplies, though
often fluctuating, has built up to a total of
very nearly one thousand million.
This becomes entirely credible to anyone
who makes a tour of the Gerresheim
works. Described and illustrated in
Gerresheimer literature, bottle manufac
ture is a perfectly logical and easily
grasped sequence of processes. Principal
materials are quartz-sand, soda and chalk.
First they are mixed in the correct
proportions - these are determined by
weight - then heated to 1500°C to form
glass in molton form. Glowing with heat
this mix is fed to overhead or drop moulds
- a term that needs explanation, since at
this point 'moulding' is simply the
preliminary process of shaping the
material into circular form and releasing it
in quantities of a given length to fall ten or
twelve feet to machinery operating at
bench height below. Here it is automati
cally blown, shaped and cast in the form
of glowing bottles which next pass
through a cooling oven before being
surface-hardened and subjected to
rigorous quality control. Then they are
packed in cartons - made in another of the
group's German factories - and shipped in
crates or shrink-foiled on pallets to the
warehouse where they await loading onto
lorries for onward despatch by road or rail
Unimaginable heat
After a visit to Gerresheim it is entirely
One of Heineken's major
bottle suppliers
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