Producer
O-I Glass, Inc. (Owens-Illinois)
World's largest glass-container maker; food and beverage bottles/jars.
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Goods downstream
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Stories
What they make
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What else they do
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Glass containers — beverage
Glass containers — food
Intelligence
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Origin2022
Owens-Illinois, the world's largest maker of glass bottles and jars, has a dramatic double history. Its founding technology — Michael Owens's 1903 automatic bottle machine, which blew 240 bottles a minute and cut labor ~80% — industrialized glass and helped end child labor in American glassworks. But at mid-century the company also manufactured 'Kaylo' asbestos pipe and block insulation, generating one of the heaviest asbestos-liability burdens in U.S. corporate history: more than 400,000 lawsuits and roughly $5 billion paid, with a subsidiary (Paddock Enterprises) filing Chapter 11 in 2020 and a ~$610M trust established for future Kaylo claims. The company behind your beer, wine and condiment bottles spent decades paying for a long-discontinued insulation product most consumers never connect to a glass jar.
O-I Glass, Inc. ↗Chokepoint2013
Glass packaging is deceptively strategic because it's brutally energy-intensive and immobile. O-I's melting furnaces run continuously at 1000-1600°C for a 10-20-year campaign and cannot simply be switched off without destroying them; natural gas supplies 70-80% of the energy and energy is 20-35% of production cost — which is why the 2022 European gas crisis hammered glassmakers. And because empty glass is heavy and costly to ship, bottle supply is inherently regional. A wine, beer or sauce brand's packaging therefore rides on a nearby, gas-hungry furnace it can't quickly replace — making the humble bottle an energy-and-logistics chokepoint rather than an interchangeable commodity.
U.S. EIA ↗