On Wednesday November 20^th, ISA Toledo Section toured the Libbey Glass plant in Toledo, Ohio. Our tour guides were Steve Bengry, Jeff Lowry, Steve Keeler and our own Ron Cook. Our turnout of 48 members made this one of the largest tour groups in recent memory.

The company was established in 1818 as the New England Glass Company in Cambridge Massachusetts. William L. Libbey joined the company in 1870 and his son Edward Drummond Libbey joined the company n 1874. The two Libbey's became partners in 1884 and changed the name to The Libbey Glass Company in 1894. Michael Owens, who had worked for the plant since the age of 10 and was the first superintendent of production, developed the first automatic glass-making machine.

Libbey has glass plants in Toledo, Shreveport Louisiana, Coi California and a joint venture with Vitro Cirsa in Mexico. They own Syracuse China (Dishes) and World Tableware (Flatware). The Toledo plant employs 1200 and annual sales are approximately $450 Million. The Toledo plant makes different sized tumblers, one-piece stemware, two piece stemware as well as some specialty items. The plant produces 50,000 dozens of glasses a day and domestically the three Libbey plants make 120,000 dozens a day.

After getting everyone signed in and issued a badge, we gathered in the Glass House, this building has displays of all the products that Libbey produces. The pictures should give you an idea of the various types of things Libbey sells. We were broken into groups of 10 to 15 to tour the plant, due to safety concerns. Our tour began in the control room of the furnaces; there are five active furnaces in the plant. These furnaces are fed with up to 28 different materials such as sand, soda ash, limestone, gypsum, cullet (recycled glass) and sodium. The most expensive ingredient is soda ash, which comes from Green River, Wyoming. A typical batch weighs 1.34 tons and they make 235 batches a day. The typical tolerances for batches are +/- 1 pound for 225,000 pounds of sand per day. The furnaces are kept hot 24 hours a day 7 days a week at a cost of $8,000 for natural gas per day. The furnaces have a minor rebuild after 5 years (45 days ~$750K) and a major rebuild at 10 years (60 days ~$1.3M - $3.5M). The side wall refractory will thin from 10" thick to less than 1" thick in five years. Furnace controls encompass temperature, fuel gas flow, airflow, pressure, and oxygen in exhaust and glass level. A regenerator is used in the furnace intake to save fuel by pre-heating intake air.

Glass goes from the Furnace to the Forehearths, were the glass is held before forming is started. There are 8 forehearths were colorants are added there are approximately 15 color changes per month. A substance called Frit made up of different metal oxides and shaped like rock salt is added to the glass to give it color. There are 30 active colors used in production, with Frit for cobalt blue costing $4500 per day. Glass level in the forehearth is controlled to 0.005" to aid in gob production. A gob is a precisely sized blob of hot glass, opening the bottom of the forehearth for a set amount of time and having a scissor type cutter cutting the glass coming out forms the gob.

The gob falls down a chute into the forming machine, a mold closes around the gob and compressed gas is blown into the mold to form the glass. The forming machines also finish one piece stemware by heating the stem and pulling it to the appropriate length. The glass is then cut and finished on another machine and sent to the Lehrs where the glasses are heated to 1017 ºF and slowly cooled. The annealing process takes about one hour to complete.

After tempering the glasses are cooled and packaged in groups of 12. Some boxes are taken down to the basement for repackaging to create boxes of mixed glasses or smaller sets. Stemware is also given fancier cut edges for certain restaurants, rather than the rounded Libbey edge. Other glasses are taken to the decorating area and have designs screen painted on them.

The packaged glasses are then sent through a new 4 million-dollar automatic palletizing system. The palletized glasses are then stored in the two-story warehouse. The warehouse can store approximately 7 million dozen glasses. The factory ships 20 full truckloads and 65 less than truckloads a day.

After the tour, we enjoyed a meal at Tony Packo’s. The service was prompt and courteous and the food was delicious as always at Packo’s. This tour was not only well attended but also very interesting and informative. We would like to thank Libbey Glass, Steve Bengry BFLI Dept. Assistant Manager, Jeff Lowry BFLI Dept. Manager and Steve Keeler BFLI Shift Supervisor for their help and patience with us. I would also like to extend a special thanks to Ron Cook for all his help organizing this tour, we couldn’t have done it without him.

Cheers and see you at the Toledo Blade!

ISA Toledo Section

Program Chairman