A new glass-manufacturing plant in Windsor is supplying beer giant Anheuser-Busch with 3.5 million bottles a day and giving a welcome boost to the area’s economy.
The city of Windsor, Weld County and the state provided training grants, tax breaks and other incentives worth about $5 million to lure Toledo, Ohio- based glassmaker O-I to an 80-acre site. The incentive package is already paying off, said Larry Burkhardt, president of the Greeley/Weld Economic Development Action Partnership.
The plant fired up its first furnace in August and is now in full production, providing bottles exclusively to the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Fort Collins.
“Initial estimates were 150 jobs, and there are now 200 good jobs with an average wage of $50,000,” Burkhardt said.
Over the next 10 years, the plant is expected to have at least a $31 million impact on Windsor’s economy, a $159 million impact on Weld County and a $462 million impact on the state, Burkhardt said.
O-I is the largest manufacturer of glass containers in the world and maintains manufacturing operations in 22 countries. The new plant is the most technologically advanced facility of its type in the world and will produce more than 1 billion bottles annually, said Dwayne Wendler, the plant manager.
Since the 1980s, bottle manufacturers have been closing plants down as plastic packaging grows in popularity, said Matt Longthorne, O-I’s North America president. The Windsor facility is the first such plant built in the U.S. in 23 years.
The Fort Collins brewery relied on bottling plants in Oklahoma and Minnesota owned by French manufacturer Saint-Go bain and Anchor Glass Container Corp. before O-I opened the new plant.
“However, glass containers are a fairly expensive thing to transport more than 250 miles, and you need a source of supply closer to your brewery,” Long thorne said.
The company considered three sites in Wyoming and eight in Colorado before deciding on the Windsor location, said Ken Lovejoy, O-I vice president and manager of facilities engineering.
The company was looking for a community with adequate power and natural-gas supplies, with a good road network and workforce, within 100 miles of Fort Collins, Lovejoy said.
Staff writer Tom McGhee can be reached at 303-820-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com.
