O-I Glass, Inc. is an American company that specializes in container glass products. It is the largest manufacturer of glass containers in

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South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

, Asia-Pacific and

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(after acquiring BSN Glasspack in 2004).

Company

While legally known as Owens-Illinois, Inc., the company changed its trade name to O-I in 2005 to group its global operations under a single, cross-language and cross-culture brand name. The company's headquarters were previously located at One SeaGate,

Toledo, Ohio Toledo ( ) is a city in Lucas County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is located at the western end of Lake Erie along the Maumee River. Toledo is the List of cities in Ohio, fourth-most populous city in Ohio and List of United Sta ...

. The headquarters were moved in late 2006 to the Levis Commons complex in Perrysburg, Ohio. The company is the successor to the Owens Bottle Company founded in 1903 by Michael Joseph Owens, who made the first automated bottle-making machine, and Edward Drummond Libbey. In 1929, the Owens Bottle Company merged with Illinois Glass Company to become Owens-Illinois, Inc. Six years later, Owens-Illinois merged with Corning Incorporated to form Owens Corning. In 1971 Owens-Illinois produced an early commercial

plasma display A plasma display panel is a type of flat-panel display that uses small cells containing Plasma (physics), plasma: Ionization, ionized gas that responds to electric fields. Plasma televisions were the first large (over diagonal) flat-panel displ ...

, the digivue. Until July 2007, the company was also a worldwide manufacturer of plastics packaging with operations in North America, South America, Asia-Pacific and Europe. Plastics packaging products manufactured by O-I included containers, closures, and prescription containers. In July 2007 O-I completed the sale of its entire plastics packaging business to

Rexam Rexam plc was a British-based multinational consumer packaging company headquartered in London, England. After spending much of its life as a paper producer known as Bowater, it diversified and became a leading manufacturer of beverage cans. It ...

, a United Kingdom listed packaging manufacturer. Owens-Illinois was a part of the

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from June 1, 1959, until March 12, 1987. The company was added to the

S&P 500 The Standard and Poor's 500, or simply the S&P 500, is a stock market index tracking the stock performance of 500 leading companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. It is one of the most commonly followed equity indices and in ...

Index in January 2009. Owens-Illinois was one of the original S&P 500 companies in 1957. It was removed in 1987 (after purchase by KKR), added in 1991 and removed again in 2000. In October 2010, Owens-Illinois Venezuela C.A was expropriated by President Hugo Chávez. In May 2015, O-I made an offer to purchase the food and beverage glass container business of Mexican company Vitro for $2.15 billion. The acquisition closed in September 2015. In 2020, a subsidiary of O-I Glass, Paddock Enterprises, entered bankruptcy following numerous asbestos lawsuits filed against the company. All of the company's asbestos-related claims were isolated within Paddock and separated from O-I's glass-making operations.

Partnership with NEG

Owens-Illinois partnered with NEG ( Nippon Electric Glass), to produce glass

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screens at its

Columbus, Ohio Columbus (, ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of cities in Ohio, most populous city of the U.S. state of Ohio. With a 2020 United States census, 2020 census population of 905,748, it is the List of United States ...

, and

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, Pennsylvania, plants in the 1970s through the mid-1990s before allowing Techneglas to take over the operations.

Environmental issues

Although it has not made asbestos-containing materials since 1958, Owens-Illinois invented, tested, manufactured and distributed KAYLO asbestos containing thermal pipe insulation from 1948 through 1958. Owens-Illinois remains a named defendant in numerous asbestos litigation matters throughout the U.S. Some claims in these cases allege that Owens-Illinois was a participant in the seventh annual Saranac Seminar when the cancer-causing potential of asbestos was studied in the 1950s. As a result of a pattern of violations producing repeat emissions, its Oregon plant was fined in August 2023 by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. This was their 10th fine.

Anti-Labor issues

In 2023, I-O Glass was penalized by the

Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) United States antitrust law, antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. It ...

for its use of illegal non-compete bindings placed on former employees of the company.https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/02/ftc-approves-final-orders-requiring-two-glass-container-manufacturers-drop-noncompete-restrictions

References

External links