question: Why are glass bottles so cheap (especially large ones like Vodka bottles)?
comment: Glass is basically just melted sand. Sand is relatively abundantly available and humans have been making glass for so long that we have become fairly good at it. However if you think the cost of the glass bottle is the price of the redemption amount you are mistaken.
passages: Despite its positioning as a mature market product, glass does enjoy a high level of consumer acceptance and is perceived as a "premium" quality packaging format.
  
  Section::::Glass container production.:Lifecycle impact.
  
  Glass containers are wholly recyclable and the glass industries in many countries have a policy, sometimes required by government regulations, of maintaining a high price on cullet to ensure high return rates. Return rates of 95% are not uncommon in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland). Return rates of less than 50% are usual in other countries.
   Biaglass Huta Szkla Białystok Sp. z o.o., was established in 1929 and has specialized in the production of mouth blown glass lampshades. Biaglass belongs to elite group of Glass Works in Europe, where 100% our lighting glass is mouth-blown.
  
  Section::::International trade.
   In terms of economics and product quality the Fourcault process has been supplanted in many countries by the Pilkington developed "Float" process. The Float process lets the molten glass settle on top of a pool of liquid tin, so that gravity creates a flat sheet. Due to various chemistry and physical aspects of window glass the Pilkington Float process produces a vastly superior product. 
   In the United States, the first whiskey brand that was sold exclusively in glass bottles was Old Forester – introduced in the 1870s by an independent bottler. The brand was promoted with the idea that by buying whisky sold in a sealed bottle, the customer could be assured that the whisky met the quality standard of the brand and had not been adulterated.
   The development of glass production in Lednické Rovne went through many organizational changes, the company overcame many crisis periods of that time and the great program and focused production such as pressed glass, cylinders for lamps, technique and laboratory glass, light bulbs, feeding bottles… changed quite often and it gained the recognition as a producer mostly quality drinking glass at the beginning of 20th century. This program is a representative article of the company to the present when the proportion of hand made and machine production was changed as well as decoration glass. From the half of 60’s of the 20th century, the company focused mainly on a gradual introduction of machinery and automatic production of glass.
   Glass collection points, known as "bottle banks" are very common near shopping centres, at civic amenity sites and in local neighborhoods in the United Kingdom. The first bottle bank was introduced by Stanley Race CBE, then president of the Glass Manufacturers’ Federation and Ron England in Barnsley on 6 June 1977. Development work was done by the DoE at Warren Springs laboratory, Stevenage, (now AERA at Harwell) and Nazeing Glass Works, Broxbourne to prove if a usable glass product could be made from over 90% recycled glass. It was found necessary to use magnets to remove unwanted metal closures in the mixture.
   The glass bottle was an important development in the history of wine, because, when combined with a high-quality stopper such as a cork, it allowed long-term aging of wine. Glass has all the qualities required for long-term storage. It eventually gave rise to "château bottling", the practice where an estate's wine is put in a bottle at the source, rather than by a merchant. Prior to this, wine used to be sold by the barrel (and before that, the amphora) and put into bottles only at the merchant's shop, if at all. This left a large and often abused opportunity for fraud and adulteration, as the consumer had to trust the merchant as to the contents. It is thought that most wine consumed outside of wine-producing regions had been tampered with in some way. Also, not all merchants were careful to avoid oxidation or contamination while bottling, leading to large bottle variation. Particularly in the case of port, certain conscientious merchants' bottling of old ports fetch higher prices even today. To avoid these problems, most fine wine is bottled at the place of production (including all port, since 1974).
   Section::::Glass manufacture.
   One of the solutions for using all the unrecycled glass was to “turn trash to treasures” and make drinking glasses, ashtrays, lampshades and earrings out of the empty bottles.
  
  After a few weeks of research, volunteer Isa set up the glass upcycling workshop on Gili T using locally available tools and a local worker, Zul, was trained to create products out of discarded bottles.
   In the early to mid-1800s, glass blowers began to use molds and several different patterns of "whiskey tasters" in several different colors were being made in molds. These glasses are also thick like today's shot glass but they will have rough pontiled bottoms from being hand blown into the mold. By the 1870s to 1890s as glass making technology improved, the rough pontiled bottoms largely disappeared from glasses and bottles.
   The deposit for refillable bottles is not defined by law. The usual rates are locally €0.02 for some wine bottles, €0.08 for beer bottles up to 0.5 L, and €0.15 for beer bottles with flip-top closures, beer bottles over 0.5 L and other bottles (mostly water and soft-drinks, lesser fruit drinks, milk, cream, yoghurt). Some bottles have an even higher deposit. Bottle crates have a deposit of €1.50. Shops only accept bottles of sold vendors and sizes.
   Emergence of efficient glass manufacturing in Europe, around the same time, lowered glass prices. This allowed the general population to purchase glass drinking vessels for the first time. These former luxury items showcased the visually pleasing golden clarity of the beer, further influencing the Pilsner's rapid dissemination.
   Making refillable glass bottles strong enough to withstand several journeys between the consumer and the bottling plant requires making them thicker and so heavier, which increases the resources required to transport them. Since transport has a large environmental impact, careful evaluation is required of the number of return journeys bottles make. If a refillable bottle is thrown away after being refilled only several times, the resources wasted may be greater than if the bottle had been designed for a single journey..
  
  Many choices involve trade-offs of environmental impact, and often there is insufficient information to make informed decisions.
  
  Section::::Retail.
   At the Karhula-Iittala design competition in 1932 Aino Aalto's famous Bölgeblick won second place. Bölgeblick tumblers went into mass production in 1949. They were discontinued in 1960 but production restarted at the Karhula glassworks in 1983. Since 1994 the Iittala glassworks took over the production where they are still being made to this day.
  
  With demand for bottles and glasses increasing since 1932 Hans Ahlström from the Ahlström Group started to modernize the Karhula and Iittala glassworks in 1935.
   Glass container manufacture in the developed world is a mature market business. World demand for flat glass was approximately 52 million tonnes in 2009. The United States, Europe and China account for 75% of demand, with China's consumption having increased from 20% in the early 1990s to 50%. Glass container manufacture is also a geographical business; the product is heavy and large in volume, and the major raw materials (sand, soda ash and limestone) are generally readily available. Therefore production facilities need to be located close to their markets. A typical glass furnace holds hundreds of tonnes of molten glass, and so it is simply not practical to shut it down every night, or in fact in any period short of a month. Factories therefore run 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This means that there is little opportunity to either increase or decrease production rates by more than a few percent. New furnaces and forming machines cost tens of millions of dollars and require at least 18 months of planning. Given this fact, and the fact that there are usually more products than machine lines, products are sold from stock. The marketing/production challenge is therefore to predict demand both in the short 4- to 12-week term and over the 24- to 48-month-long term. Factories are generally sized to service the requirements of a city; in developed countries there is usually a factory per 1–2 million people. A typical factory will produce 1–3 million containers a day.
   How glass containers compare to other packaging types (plastic, cardboard, aluminium) is hard to say; conclusive lifecycle studies are yet to be produced.
  
  Section::::Float glass process.
   Glass production
  
  Glass production involves two main methods – the float glass process that produces sheet glass, and glassblowing that produces bottles and other containers.
  
  Section::::Glass container production.
  
  Section::::Glass container production.:Glass container factories.
  
  Broadly, modern glass container factories are three-part operations: the batch house, the hot end, and the cold end. The "batch house" handles the raw materials; the "hot end" handles the manufacture proper—the forehearth, annealing ovens, and forming machines; and the "cold end" handles the product-inspection and packaging equipment.
  
  Section::::Glass container production.:Hot end.
   Glass bottles and glass jars are in many households around the world. The first glass bottles were produced in south east Asia around 100 B.C., and in the Roman Empire around 1 AD. America's glass bottle and glass jar industry was born in the early 1600s, when settlers in Jamestown built the first glass melting furnace. The invention of the automatic glass bottle blowing machine in 1880 industrialized the process of making bottles.
  
  Section::::Manufacture.
   Many bottles were still being mouth-blown and their lips formed by assorted tooling devices as late as 1915-20. The patent for the first fully automatic bottle machine, the Owens Automatic Bottle Machine, was not issued until 1903. And by 1906 it was swiftly replacing the old method at glasshouses nationwide. Early examples of machine made bottles manufactured between about 1906 and 1915 often resemble their predecessors in shape and color and can be nominally valuable for that reason.
   BULLET::::- Glass – the Leith Glassworks stood on Baltic Street and dated from 1746. There is also some reference to earlier glass production from 1682, but the site of this earlier works is unclear. Leith specialised in wine bottles, largely for export to France and Spain. At its peak (c.1770) production was a staggering one million bottles per week. The Leith pattern bottle is the parallel-sided, round shouldered, narrow neck bottle now dominant within the wine industry. Around 1770 the company branched into lead crystal glass, mainly for chandeliers. This was under a new company name of the Edinburgh Crystal Company but stood on the same site in Leith (ironically this company has never truly been in "Edinburgh").
   Glass is a relatively heavy packing material and wine bottles use quite thick glass, so the tare weight of a full wine bottle is a relatively high proportion of its gross weight. The average weight of an empty 750 ml wine bottle is 500 g (and can range from 300 to 900 g), which makes the glass 40% of the total weight of the full bottle. This has led to suggestions that wine should be exported in bulk from producer regions and bottled close to the market. This would reduce the cost of transportation and its carbon footprint, and provide a local market for recycled green glass. 
   The first commercially successful glass bottle blowing machine was an automatic model introduced in 1905. The machine, operated by a two-man crew working 12-hour shifts, could produce 17,280 bottles in 24 hours, compared to 2,880 bottles made by a crew of six men and boys working in a shop for a day. The cost of making bottles by machine was 10 to 12 cents per gross compared to $1.80 per gross by the manual glassblowers and helpers.
   Through the early 20th century, when the cost of producing glass bottles was higher, a natural industry of glass bottle collectors and merchants performed a similar function to the modern CDL. Bottle accumulators, a licensed and unionized workforce commonly known as "bottle-ohs" from their street cries, travelled by cart around the streets buying empty bottles from households and businesses. They would then sell the bottles to a bottle yard, which would store and sort the bottles before selling them in bulk to brewers and other bottlers. It was an industry from which a bottle-oh could make a good living; in 1904, they could buy a dozen beer bottles for 6d., sell them to the bottle yard for 9d., who could sell them to brewers for 1s. The commercial reuse of glass bottles and the bottle collecting industry had all but disappeared by the 1950s.
   Glass collection points, known as Bottle Banks are very common near shopping centres, at civic amenity sites and in local neighborhoods in the United Kingdom. Bottle Banks commonly stand beside collection points for other recyclable waste like paper, metals and plastics. Local, municipal waste collectors usually have one central point for all types of waste in which large glass containers are located. There are now over 50,000 bottle banks in the United Kingdom, and 752,000 tons of glass are now recycled annually.
   Of course glass containers can also be reused, and in developing countries this is common, however the environmental impact of washing containers as against remelting them is uncertain. Factors to consider here are the chemicals and fresh water used in the washing, and the fact that a single-use container can be made much lighter, using less than half the glass (and therefore energy content) of a multiuse container. Also, a significant factor in the developed world's consideration of reuse are producer concerns over the risk and consequential product liability of using a component (the reused container) of unknown and unqualified safety.
  