O-I plant quietly becomes part of Windsor economy

It’s hard to miss the large red and blue O-I letters on the manufacturing plant in Windsor’s east-side industrial area. And it’s even harder to miss the numerous semi-trucks traversing Windsor’s Main Street.

But other than that, you’d be hard pressed to know that the Fortune 500 company’s first new bottle manufacturing plant built in 25 years is up and running – and has been since August 2005. “They came in pretty seamless with very little hullabaloo,´ said Windsor Mayor Ed Starck. “They came to Windsor, built their plant and started producing glass containers.”

O-I – Owens-Illinois started doing business with just the initials in 2004 when then-CEO Steven McCracken sought to transform the worldwide company into one with a unified global identity – built its 500,000-square-foot, $140 million plant, with an economic package that included a $500,000 performance-based grant from the state of Colorado for creating new jobs. In addition, the state provided a Community Development Block Grant of more than $770,000 to help fund infrastructure at the site and about $60,000 in job training.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Federal District Court Rules Corporate Transparency Act Unconstitutional . . . But Most Small Businesses Must Still Comply

Lyons Gaddis Real Estate and Business Attorney Cameron Grant shares important details of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA).

The plant employs 200, drawn from 4,100 applications received when it first opened. Almost 90 percent of the new hires, whose salaries start at $40,000, come from the Northern Colorado work force. Rocky Mountain Bottle Co. in Wheat Ridge, a joint venture subsidiary of O-I and Molson Coors Brewing Co., trains the new work force in glass bottle manufacturing.

The Ohio-based company achieved its goal of making 1 billion bottles annually in 2006 – that averages out to 3 million bottles a day (now there’s a camp song to sing). Most of the bottles are trucked over to the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fort Collins. In mid-August, the company started making bottles for New Belgium Brewing Co. in Fort Collins as well, according Kelley Yoder, O-I communications director.

The Windsor plant joins 100 O-I manufacturing plants worldwide. Bottles manufactured here are the amber 12-ounce beauties that beer enthusiasts have grown to love. But O-I also makes bottles for spirits worldwide in 40 different colors and sometimes in unusual or artistic shapes, such as those that nest together.

Rail cars, truck traffic and massive furnaces

Raw materials – sand, soda ash and limestone – are brought into Windsor from throughout the region by rail, about five or six rail cars daily, Yoder said. The first step in the glassmaking process is melting, where cullet, or crushed, recycled glass, is mixed with raw materials in a furnace whose temperature hovers between 2,300 and 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The Windsor plant has two such furnaces.

From there the molten glass is cooled slightly and sent to be molded and cooled even more. Bottles are then reheated, close to the melting point, then cooled again to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. This process helps strengthen the bottle.

The bottle temperature is reduced further and an exterior coating applied. After inspection – those that don’t pass get recycled, maybe 5 percent of all bottles – they are packed for shipping.

On any given day, between 20 and 50 semi-trailers drive along Colorado Highway 257, a mile or so of which is Windsor’s Main Street, to the A-B plant north of Fort Collins.

Mayor Starck said truck traffic through Windsor is inevitable. “If you don’t allow businesses to come in, they will come in under another jurisdiction, and you may have traffic problems anyway. Is truck traffic noticeable? Sure it is. Is the road system in needed of changes? Sure. We’re looking at that,” he said.

One alternative could be to continue truck traffic from Colorado 257 onto County Road 19 and connect with County Road 74 – Harmony Road – to the north.

Having O-I as well as Kodak Colorado Division a part of Windsor helps to make the community attractive to other potential large-scale employers, Starck said.

“It’s not just Windsor being Windsor, but we’re close to CSU, UNC, CU and close to I-25. As far as rail lines, we have two major ones within 15 miles, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific. We have a lot of good things in the mix,” he explained.

O-I is now one of them.